


The Circle

by Lisse



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Dark, Gen, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-04-10
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-06 10:03:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 67,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/417603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Decades after Luke Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side, a young and rather boring mechanic discovers how far he must go to protect his family - and why being named after crazy old Ben Kenobi can attract all the wrong kinds of attention. </p>
<p>(AU from <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i>. Doesn't so much ignore the EU as shamelessly cherry-pick it. Characters in the mirror may be less original than they appear. BYO subtext.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_ "There are hundreds of space children in the ports and shipping docks of the galaxy - children who never know their fathers other than by unflattering reputation. Oh, many dream that he might be something else, grand and noble and heroic, but all face reality in the end."  
_ \- El-Seo Null,  _One-Night Stand: A Galactic History of Smugglers and Sexuality_ , Santi-Solis Academy Ltd.

 _"My father spoke of Darth Rage with the greatest respect, but would punish me if I watched old historical holovids. He was never willing to admit that the traitorous Rebel Skywalker had become our Emperor's most trusted servant."  
_ \- Aelius Bekwin,  _Memoirs of an Imperial Childhood_ , Coronet City Publishing

* * *

The tiny settlement of Draco's Well clung to the edge of the Dune Sea, its inhabitants enduring violent sandstorms and temperamental machinery with the same constant, all-encompassing patience. It was a place where the epic feud over Who Took Farstrider's Bantha carried more weight than dying revolutions, and where the most important gossip had more to do with what old Padreic the odd-jobs-man had stolen this time than with far-reaching empires.

Ben Darklighter loved it.

"Hey! Hey, Ben!" His cousin appeared in the doorway of the Darklighters' garage, bouncing on her toes. "There's a bunch of lights over the hills and me and Lora are gonna go borrow her mom's electrobinoculars. Do you wanna come with us?" The words came out in an explosive rush, with hardly a pause for breath.

Ben smiled, but didn't bother to look up from the ancient holoproj in his lap. It was acting up again, so he had flipped it over and was trying to retune it. "What kind of lights?"

"Just flashes right now. I bet it's a space battle. Looks like it's a big one, too."

"You always say it's big, Sasha. It's probably just a couple of smugglers again." He glanced up at her long enough to shrug. "I don't think I need to see this one."

"Some fun you are," Sasha Darklighter said, rolling her eyes. Ben thought he heard her muttering something about boring cousins as she left, but he couldn't be sure. After a moment, he shrugged and went back to fixing the holoproj.

Ben was eighteen years old - five whole years older than Sasha - and he rather liked being dull. He was a short, stocky sort of boy with tousled red hair and eyes that might have been called laser-green if they had belonged to someone more interesting, and he loved Draco's Well precisely because it was so simple and predictable. Nothing ever happened, petty thefts and epic bantha feuds aside, and when the vaporators were between harvests it was easy enough to find a secluded corner and tinker with a recalcitrant bit of machinery. Not that he minded the endless repairs. Methodical and patient even by the settlement's high standards, Ben had a singular talent for fixing anything - a talent that everyone else in Draco's Well seemed to admire, even if Ben himself didn't find it all that unusual.

This particular holoproj had fallen prey to one of the usual problems. As most of the settlement's technology was wont to do, it had simply worn out. Ordinarily Ben wouldn't have bothered with it, but it was the only holoproj in Draco's Well - and while he certainly didn't want to see off-planet news about the latest Imp victory or watch endless reruns of  _Captain Fantastik and the Thunder T.I.E.s_ , Sasha definitely did. He thought it was best to appease her rather than risk her wrath. He had to live with her, after all.

He stuck his tongue between his teeth and squinted down at the half-corroded bits of circuitry and wiring. The holoproj was older than Ben's Uncle Gavin and Aunt Olivea, so getting it retuned involved finding frequencies manually and configuring things in ways that the original manufacturers had probably never intended. A glance told him that it would take a small miracle to get it working again, one he wasn't sure he could pull off.

Which was why he was mentally rehearsing ways to tell Sasha that she'd have to do without her precious holodramas when the holoproj flickered and hissed and suddenly lit up - at which point he let out a loud and rather embarrassing " _Ack!_ " and knocked it out of his lap.

He righted it hastily - no need to damage it worse than it was - and gingerly pressed the power switch. There was a faint whiff of burning circuitry, and with a strange popping sound, the holoproj sprang to life.

Sort of.

Ben stared. Instead of  _Thunder T.I.E.s_ , he had a jumble of static and nonsensical symbols, like some kind of strange code. The words "Priority Gold Transmission" hovered at the bottom of the projection.

"Oops," he said.

The transmission didn't have the good grace to disappear. It just continued to scroll, as if it belonged in the middle of an isolated settlement instead of somewhere where "priority gold transmission" actually meant something.

Ben worried his lower lip and wondered exactly what to do with this. He was unsettled. Normally he wasn't the sort of person to be interested in strange transmissions, because they were the sort of things that only happened in holodramas and he'd always found the idea of reading them rather rude, but a transmission accompanied by Sasha's mysterious flashes of light was another story. The fact that both things had happened at the same time was probably a coincidence - but then again, what if it wasn't?

So instead of deleting the bizarre transmission like a sensible person, he saved it onto a data chip and carefully stowed it in his pocket for further examination. Trying to puzzle it out might be fun after dinner, when there was nothing else to do but listen to Uncle Gavin's stories and tinker with the cooling system again. After all, he reasoned, it wasn't as if someone was likely to come looking for it, priority transmission or not. No one came to Draco's Well.

With this justification firmly in mind, he deleted the code from the holoproj's memory and went back to retuning it without a second thought.

* * *

Nights at the Darklighter home had a familiar, time-honored rhythm. Admittedly it was a rhythm that involved a lot of complaining and general fussiness, but Ben knew it the same way he knew every tool in the family's garage, and he had always thought it was comforting in its strange way.

First came Uncle Gavin asking about the vaporators ("Number three's still broken.") and Aunt Olivea wondering when they ought to make their monthly run to Anchorhead for supplies ("Sasha's outgrown her shirts. Again.") Then they all settled down for an ever more meager dinner, and Ben got to sit quietly, eat, and watch the newest big issues of the day happen to other people.

"Murenn and Sarai say there's been another attack out past Anchorhead," Aunt Olivea said as an opener.

Uncle Gavin didn't look up from his meal. This was a familiar topic. "Sand People again?"

"They're getting worse," Aunt Olivea muttered. "Bolder, too. It wouldn't kill the garrison to patrol here once in a while."

Sasha scowled and shook her head. "Imps can't catch Sand People. They'd just make trouble for us."

"Don't talk like that," Aunt Olivea said, right as Ben kicked his cousin under the table.

Uncle Gavin helped himself to another piece of flatbread. "Why shouldn't she? She's right. We don't want Imps around here."

"A couple conscripts wouldn't matter. Unless you plan to antagonize them somehow."

"Hmph," Uncle Gavin muttered.

Aunt Olivea wasn't about to give up. "We're not  _safe_  here," she snapped. "Mos Espa's close enough to the garrison to keep most of the raiders away. We could stay with my aunt until we got back on our feet and find our own place."

Ben bit back a groan. Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - the friendly arguing went a bit too far. There were some topics his aunt and uncle didn't talk about by mutual agreement. Moving should have been one of them. But now Aunt Olivea had brought it up again, which meant any chance of a semi-peaceful dinner had officially gone out of the window.

Sure enough, Uncle Gavin frowned up at his wife. "That's out of the question."

"The vaporator's still broken - the one we haven't finished paying off, Gavin!" Aunt Olivea set her plate down with a loud  _clunk_. "We can't live off the garage anymore, not with the Sand People scaring off all our business!"

"Lora says they bring in slavers to get people who don't pay off their loans," Sasha murmured at Ben from her end of the table. Ben - who was well aware of all the money they owed and all the problems it could cause, and who really wished everyone would stop fighting long enough for him to finish his dinner - gave her a  _look_  and kicked her again.

Uncle Gavin had gone very quiet, which was never a good sign. "We'll make do, Olivea. If I need to, I'll find a job in Mos Espa between harvests. You and Ben can watch the garage while I'm gone."

"I can go."

Ben found himself staring at three slightly bewildered faces. He almost never said anything when the arguments got serious. Truth be told, he was surprised he had spoken up.

"Not by yourself," Aunt Olivea said at last. "It's too dangerous."

"We need the money, and Uncle Gavin knows more about running a garage than I do." Ben attempted a smile. "It'd only be for a season, and if it means we can stay here - "

" _No._ " Aunt Olivea stood up, hands on her hips, so she could tower over him. "You're not leaving here by yourself, Ben. Under any circumstances."

"He's not leaving here, period." Uncle Gavin reached over and gently tugged Aunt Olivea back into her seat. "You know what Mos Espa's like. He'll get himself killed, or worse."

"If we're with him - "

" _Or worse_ , Olivea."

There was something behind those words, some meaning that Ben couldn't quite catch. Whatever it was, it made Aunt Olivea grimace and bow her head in defeat. The fight was over almost before it had begun, but thick tension remained hanging over his aunt and uncle - not because of Mos Espa or money, but because of  _or worse_.

But what could possibly be worse than slavers?

Ben pushed his plate away, suddenly anything but hungry. "C'mon," he murmured to Sasha. "Let's take another look at that vaporator."

Aunt Olivea looked up sharply. "It's getting dark out."

He shrugged. "We'll be careful. Maybe I can get the vaporator running if it isn't overheated."

His aunt looked ready to protest, but Uncle Gavin just shook his head at her. "He's right. We need it working. Hurry back if you see anything odd," he added to Ben, "and take the carbine."

"I'll get it." Sasha stacked her plate on the counter and went to retrieve the family's antiquated blaster carbine from its home by the front door. That left Ben momentarily alone with his aunt and uncle, neither of whom seemed inclined to talk to him.

"I'm careful," he said when the silence felt too heavy. "You know I am. I'd be careful in Mos Espa too. I promise I wouldn't do anything stupid."

Uncle Gavin all but shoved him after Sasha, who had already disappeared out the door. "Don't make me hold you to that."

* * *

The Darklighters owned four vaporators around the perimeter of Draco's Well, more than any other family. Along with the garage, they made enough money to live extremely well by the settlement's standards.

Or they had been making enough, anyway.

"I dunno why you're trying to repair this," Sasha muttered as she helped Ben pry the vaporator's maintenance hatch open. "It's a piece of junk. We got cheated."

"You heard your dad. We can't go to Mos Espa." Ben sighed and leaned back on his heels, listening to his cousin with half an ear. In his mind's eye he pictured the circuitry and wiring that ran through the vaporator, pinpointing all the weak points where things could and did go wrong. "I think one of the converters fried. Hand me the welder, would you?"

Sasha dug the tool out of their landspeeder's toolbox and pressed it into his hand. "What's so bad about Mos Espa?"

"It's big, it's crowded, and people get shot a lot."

"But at least stuff happens there!" Sasha jabbed a finger at the sky, shaded purple and gold as the twin suns set over the hills. "I bet people in Mos Espa know what that space battle was about!" When Ben didn't answer - because this, too, was an old and familiar argument - she scowled and crouched next to him. "Are you really gonna stay here your whole life?"

He shrugged. "I think so."

"What about finding your father? Don't you want to do that?"

 _Not this again._  Ben sighed. This was another topic that no one was supposed to bring up. "My father was a smuggler," he said as patiently and reasonably as he could. "I don't think he knows I exist. Why should I go looking for him?"

"Because you could, that's why." She hauled a portable lamp out of the family's battered old landspeeder and began to rig it up. "Maybe he could give you a job."

"I like my job here, thanks." When Sasha opened her mouth to splutter at him, he sighed and held up his hand to cut off her protests. "I don't want to meet him, okay? I'm happy here. I'll help you find a job in Mos Espa or something when you're old enough, but..." He trailed off with an awkward shrug, his gaze still locked on the vaporator. This wasn't a conversation he particularly wanted to have.

"Ben?"

Her voice actually sounded strained. Despite himself, Ben felt bad for getting annoyed with her. He knew Sasha didn't love Draco's Well the way he did - that she was practically counting down the days until she could copy their cousin Biggs and go find adventure somewhere offworld and hopefully not get killed in the process - and it wasn't really his place to blame her for being reckless.

He finally looked up from the vaporator. "Look, I didn't mean - "

" _Ben_."

Sasha wasn't even looking at him. She had risen into a half-crouch, staring at some point in the rapidly darkening sky. Her eyes were wide and round. Ben followed her gaze and instantly spotted what she had - three bright lights growing bigger with each passing second.

Ships heading right for Draco's Well. Big ships.

"Shut off the light," he whispered.

Sasha scrambled for the lamp and all but ripped it out of its power source. "What are those?"

"I don't know." He glanced at the distant lights of the settlement and then at the rapidly approaching ships. "I - I think they might be from Mos Espa."

" _Slavers?_ " Her voice rose into a squeak of terror.

Ben fought down rising panic, as well as the odd urge to glare at her and ask if this was enough adventure for her. Getting angry wouldn't do any good. There was no point in trying to race those ships back to Draco's Well, not in the family's rundown landspeeder, and they had no radios or comm systems to call ahead and warn anyone. There was nowhere at all to hide.

Something - he wasn't even sure what - drew his attention to the vaporator. He flung himself back down beside it and began to frantically sort through his tools.

Sasha stared at him as if he had gone completely mad. "What are you  _doing?_ "

"Shutting this down." He didn't think he had the time to explain things to her, but he knew that if he didn't, she would panic and take off for Draco's Well anyway. "It's dark, right? They'll have to use energy scanners to find anyone outside the settlement." He wedged a hydrospanner into the tangled wires and began to shut off connections. In a vague, distant sort of way he wondered what Uncle Gavin would say when he realized his nephew had destroyed their new vaporator for good - but then he thought that maybe Uncle Gavin would never get to tell him anything ever again, and he desperately tried to ignore the unpleasant knot in his stomach.

After what seemed like an eternity, the vaporator's lights blinked off. Ben kicked the tools aside and climbed back to his feet. His explanation seemed to have snapped Sasha out of her stupor, because she was leaning into the landspeeder and quickly shutting off all the emergency power. Ben glanced over his shoulder, ran over to her, and yanked her after him under the landspeeder.

Almost before he had touched the ground, he heard a noise like the world's loudest insect pass over their heads. He wrapped one arm around Sasha and tried to peer up at the ships without revealing himself. For a moment he caught a glimpse of a gleaming silver transport ship, its sides lit up by dozens of windows. Then a familiar spoked circle caught his eye and he rolled further under the landspeeder with his eyes squeezed shut.

_Imps._

Ben felt nothing for or against the Empire. He certainly didn't loathe it the way Uncle Gavin and Sasha did. Whatever the Imps did, the people affected by them never came to Draco's Well. Neither did the Imps themselves. No one cared about his home.

Except now the Imps did. They cared enough to bring three troop transports. He shivered, suddenly chilled in a way that had nothing to do with the rapidly cooling night air. The knot in his stomach had gotten larger and tighter, and there was something about the sight of those ships that made him want to drop everything and run away as far and fast as he could.

"They're gone." Sasha slowly removed her hands from her ears as the sounds began to fade. "Ben, those were - "

He shook his head, not willing to hear anyone say the word, and rolled out from under the landspeeder. By the time Sasha followed him, he was collecting his scattered tools. "Where's the carbine?"

"In the landspeeder." She hugged herself and stared at the lights from Draco's Well. The three ships seemed to be spiraling toward it, as if they all planned to land squarely in the middle of the settlement. "What are we gonna do?"

He opened his mouth, but no brilliant idea was forthcoming. "We can stay at Hermit's Hut for the night," he said at last. "There might be an old comm there. We can call your mom and dad, and if nothing happens we can come back in the morning."

"You're just gonna  _leave?_ "

Sometimes he really hated being the dull, sensible one. "What else can we do?" he asked as he bundled up the last of his tools. "Those are - " He still couldn't make himself say  _Imps_ , so he settled for powering the landspeeder back up. "What if they want to do something bad? We hid so they wouldn't see us, remember?"

Her breath hitched. He couldn't see her face, but he knew she was crying anyway. "You're such a coward."

"I guess." Ben pushed away from the landspeeder and walked over to her, because he was afraid if he stopped moving he would wind up on the sand, shaking too hard to get back up. "You can call me whatever you want," he said as he gently steered her toward the passenger seat. "I'll let you swear at me and everything tomorrow. Please get in the landspeeder."

Sniffling and glaring, calling him all kinds of things under her breath, she did.

* * *

Hermit's Hut was in the middle of nowhere, even to Ben. It was generally avoided by Sand People and Jawas alike, and every settler child had grown up listening to frightening stories about Old Kenobi's Ghost. The most popular one was about the moisture farmers the crazy old man had killed, and about how he had kidnapped the Skywalker boy and dragged him off to parts unknown - and everyone knew what had become of Skywalker, of course.

Ben didn't like that story very much.

He didn't particularly like Hermit's Hut either - the place had always made him feel like something was staring at the back of his head - but it seemed like the safest place to hide out for the night. He pried the door open without too much trouble and herded Sasha inside, wrapping her up in the blanket from the landspeeder's emergency kit. By the time he had finished unpacking things like the carbine and the portable lamp, she was already asleep on the floor.

Which left him alone with the hut. Great.

A quick inspection of the room revealed a couple of sealed chests, several pipes laid out on a table, and a tiny fold-out kitchen unit that, on closer inspection, proved to be out of fuel. Ben slid it back into place before he turned his attention to the chests. It felt invasive and wrong to be going through Old Kenobi's things, but he wasn't in the mood to worry about that. He would just have to feel terrible about it later.

He had never turned his mechanical skills to opening locks before, but Old Kenobi's didn't provide much resistance. They sprang open after a few moments' fiddling. The chests proved to contain a couple articles of clothing, a few cloaks, some datadisks, and some kind of cylinder that produced a long red blade when activated. Ben spent an alarming minute trying not to cut off his own foot before he figured out how to turn the thing off. He decided it was some kind of bizarre laser cutter and stowed it with the rest of his tools.

When the chests produced nothing else of interest, he switched off the portable lamp and spread one of the dusty brown cloaks on the floor beside Sasha, wrapping himself up in it and settling the blaster carbine within easy reach. He expected to lie awake for half the night, shivering and staring at the distant curving shape of the Hut's ceiling, and so was more surprised than anyone when, utterly exhausted, he drifted off almost immediately.

He only woke up once, when he thought he heard a man and woman murmuring to each other in low, anxious voices - but when he opened his eyes, there was only Sasha's familiar snoring. Suppressing a shiver, Ben huddled in the cloak and went back to sleep, lulled by the sound of imaginary arguments on the edge of his hearing.


	2. Chapter 2

_"The odd-jobs-man plays a vital role in Tatooine settler culture. Part trader, part repairman, part entertainer, he knows the Jundland Wastes better than anyone on the planet and often serves as the only link between isolated settlements and the outside world."_  
\- Mireth Dann, "We Are The Sun's Children": Life and Death on Desert Worlds, Carida Academy Ltd.  


__Lieutenant Drai: Captain, no! This isn't an ordinary Rebel! This is a Jedi Knight! They're killers!__  
Captain Fantastik: Jedi are just like every other traitor. You shoot 'em, they die.  
\- Captain Fantastik and the Thunder T.I.E.s, Episode 127: "A Traitor in Their Midst"  


* * *

Ben woke up to clanking cooling pipes and the sound of someone swearing.

It was odd swearing, too - quiet and not terribly inventive, but with a sort of steady cadence that suggested the speaker was doing it more out of habit than actual anger. It was coming from directly outside the hut's sealed door, along with shuffling noises and muffled thumps. Someone was trying to get around the lock.

"Sasha." Ben pushed himself up on one arm and reached over to shake his cousin's shoulder. He kept his eyes locked on the door and dropped his voice to a harsh whisper. " _Sasha, wake up._ "

After a moment she blinked blearily at him. "Muh?"

" _Shh!_ " He gestured to the door and the swearing noises.

All the blood drained out of Sasha's face. "Imps?" she hissed.

Ben shook his head. "I don't know." Some corner of his mind was running through possible ways out - but there weren't any. Hermit's Hut was just like every other building designed to keep out the midday heat. It was low to the ground with no windows and only one door, and it was built on solid rock. He still had the strange laser cutter, but it would take time to cut another exit through the walls, and by then whoever was outside would be well aware of what was going on.

"We're trapped, aren't we." It wasn't even a question. Sasha shifted closer to him, still tangled up in the emergency blanket. "What're we gonna do?"

 _Panic?_  He pushed the stray thought away and grabbed for the carbine. "Take this and find somewhere to hide," he said as he climbed to his feet.

"This is  _stupid_ ," she hissed, but took the carbine and scrambled up after him.

"You're the one who takes potshots at womprats," he said as he began to dig through his tools.

"So what're you gonna do? Lecture them to death?"

At least she seemed to have her sense of humor back. Holding the carbine probably helped. "I've got this," he said as he extracted the laser cutter from the mess. The cylinder felt awkward in his hand, but it would do. Besides, he knew Sasha was a better shot than he was. He'd only fired the carbine at rocks, and that was just because Uncle Gavin had insisted he know how to hold the thing.

"That?  _That?_ " Sasha stared at the cylinder, then at his face. It was an odd look too, as if he had suddenly changed right before her eyes. "Are you  _crazy?_ "

"Go hide already!"

For a moment he thought she wasn't going to listen. Then she flicked the carbine's safety off and crouched behind the kitchen unit.

Which left Ben facing the door with nothing more than an oversized construction tool.

He turned the thing on with a too-loud  _snap-hiss_  and held it carefully away from him.  _This_  is  _stupid_ , the familiar logical corner of his mind said.  _If these are Imps or slavers, I'm going to die._

Then the door slid open and he stopped thinking much altogether. Instead he brought the red blade around with a yell, very nearly cutting off his own arm in the process, and stared up its length at -

Sasha popped up out of her hiding place. " _Padreic?_ "

The odd-jobs-man glaring down at Ben was very tall and leaned heavily on a cane, but he still wouldn't have attracted much notice anywhere on Tatooine. He had white hair and sun-browned skin and was holding what looked suspiciously like a lockpick in one long-fingered, gnarled hand.

He also appeared to be very, very angry.

"Turn that off this instant, boy!"

Ben did, hastily clipping the laser cutter to his belt. "Sorry."

Old Padreic didn't look terribly convinced. "That's a fine way to get yourself killed." He hobbled into the hut as if he owned it, shutting and locking the door behind him. "I should have thought to check here first. I've been all over the Jundland Wastes looking for you."

Ben wondered if he could get away with banging his head on a wall. He had never really liked Padreic, whom he found inherently  _wrong_  in some way that he couldn't quite pinpoint, but he knew how well the odd-jobs-man knew the land around the settlements.

"Did Mom and Dad comm you?" Sasha asked as she carefully set the carbine on the floor. "Ben said we were gonna go back this morning," she added with a glare in his general direction. He did his best to ignore it.

"Ah." The old man gave Ben an odd, searching look, then nodded to the cylinder dangling from his belt. "Did you find that here?"

Ben nodded, feeling very foolish.

"And you spent the night here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. I was afraid you'd gone running into the Dune Sea." Padreic straightened up as much as he ever did and looked from one to the other, his pale eyes unreadable. "What made you choose here?"

"No one comes here," Ben said. He could feel Sasha glaring at the back of his head and realized he probably sounded less polite than he should have. "Except you, I guess."

" _I'm_  here because I was looking for the pair of you." Padreic sighed. "The Anchorhead Darklighters were out all night trying to find you. They thought I might have more luck."

The half-forgotten sick, cold feeling from the previous night suddenly returned in full force. Ben swallowed around a suddenly dry throat. "Padreic," he said slowly and carefully, because he was jumping to conclusions he didn't want to reach, "we don't even talk to the Anchorhead Darklighters. Why are they looking for us?"

"What happened to my parents?" Sasha demanded.

Padreic smiled for an instant, but the gesture was sad and humorless. "The Empire destroyed Draco's Well and Noon Ridge last night. We've counted sixteen casualties so far."

Sasha hurried over until she was standing right next to Ben, leaning on him as if she needed him for support. "Just tell me about my mom and dad!" Her voice cracked.

"No one can find your father, but there is some reason to think he's being held at the Imperial garrison in Mos Espa." Padreic hesitated a moment before continuing. "They buried your mother this morning."

Ben managed to catch his cousin before her legs gave out completely. He lowered her down to the floor and sat beside her, feeling as if some fundamental part of his world had been ripped away from him. His aunt was dead and his uncle was missing. The home he had always counted on to be safe and unimportant was just  _gone_. It had been gone the moment Sasha had seen those transport ships.

Sasha was shaking her head slowly and saying something that may have been "no" over and over again. She was crying too hard for him to tell. Helpless to do anything else, he hugged her and rocked her while Padreic watched them with an odd, detached expression on his face.

* * *

Padreic insisted on getting them out of Hermit's Hut as soon as possible. "The Empire hasn't noticed you yet," he told them in his rasping voice, "but they will soon."

Ben didn't feel like arguing with him. He didn't feel much of anything at all, really. Moving mechanically, he bundled up the cloak and blanket with the rest of the emergency supplies and stowed them in the landspeeder.

"Are you keeping that?" Sasha asked, nodding to the cylinder dangling from his belt. It was the first time she had spoken since Padreic had delivered his news.

Ben blinked down at it. "I guess so. It might come in handy for clearing out the rubble."

When she said nothing, he went back to carefully reattaching the portable lamp to its power source. He was already thinking ahead to how he could go about repairing the family's home. If it was too damaged, they would have to ask for a loan from the Anchorhead Darklighters - not something he relished doing, but probably safer than asking the brokers in Mos Espa, not when they'd have to worry about paying for that vaporator too -

"It's a lightsaber, Ben."

He looked up from his tangle of wires. "Huh?"

"It's a lightsaber. I saw it on the holo once." Sasha fidgeted, as if she didn't know exactly what she wanted to say. "Jedi Knights used it," she said at last, "and - and I think maybe you shouldn't wear it."

"Oh." He unclipped it and shoved it with the rest of his tools, attempting a small smile. "You don't think I'm a Jedi, right?"

Sasha threw a handful of sand at him. "Not funny," she muttered. But she seemed a little more normal after that, which was what Ben wanted anyway. He needed his cousin to keep going until they figured out what had happened to Uncle Gavin. Then they could both mourn as much as they needed to.

He lugged the lamp and his tools out to the landspeeder. After a moment's thought, he shoved the tools all the way under the emergency kit, where they would be almost impossible to spot. It seemed like a stupid thing to do - he bet almost no one from Draco's Well even knew what a Jedi  _was_  - but if it made Sasha feel better, he'd do it.

"You have an aunt in Mos Espa, don't you?" Padreic asked as he hobbled over.

Ben nodded. "Great-Aunt Liza. She's - she was Aunt Olivea's aunt."

"And she'll lie for you if she has to?"

How was he supposed to know that? "I don't know her that well. She and Uncle Gavin don't get along."

"Hmph. I suppose the pair of you can stay with her as a last resort. Just until this blows over," he added when Ben started to object. "Then you can go home."

It should have been reassuring to hear that, but it wasn't. Ben associated home with permanence, and nothing would ever be like it was with Aunt Olivea gone. "I guess so," he said, because it seemed like the polite thing to do.

Padreic smiled faintly. "You don't trust me."

Great. He had no idea how to answer that. He settled for taking longer than necessary to adjust the emergency kit. "I don't know you very well, sir."

"You can tell something's not right about me, can't you."

Ben's breath caught. Suddenly he had visions of elaborate traps and Imp ships flying over the horizon, because of course he had been right - he didn't know Padreic at  _all_.

But the old odd-jobs-man just laughed softly. "I'm not going to turn you in. I'm here to find you and that's what I'm doing." He patted Ben on the shoulder. "Get your cousin moving. We're taking your landspeeder into Mos Espa."

"I thought I could leave Sasha in Anchorhead." Ben's heart was still hammering against his ribs. Somehow Padreic felt more wrong than ever, as if he ought to have been out of focus and wasn't. "She'd be safe there, right?"

"And where do you think the Empire will look, once they realize someone's missing?" The old man shook his head. "Believe it or not, right now Sasha is safest with you."

That didn't make him feel any better, but before he could point out that this wasn't saying very much, Padreic turned around and shuffled back to the hut. Ben stared after him, wondering if he ought to just disobey him and take Sasha somewhere more familiar than Mos Espa. But of course the old man was right. He didn't understand why the Imps had attacked Draco's Well, but sooner or later they were going to realize that they had missed two people. Maybe that was why they had taken Uncle Gavin.

Ben scowled and went back to securing the rest of their supplies, and wished with all his heart that Padreic wasn't right.

* * *

Mos Espa was located quite a ways from Hermit's Hut. Even with Ben piloting the landspeeder much faster than he would have liked, they had to stop for lunch in the scant shade of a rocky outcropping. Padreic produced dried meat and water from somewhere, and Ben and Sasha ate in silence while he sat a few paces away, almost as if he were keeping watch.

By the time the unfamiliar sprawl of the spaceport came into view, the afternoon was half gone. Ben squinted and shaded his eyes against the setting suns, trying to get his bearings. "It's  _huge_. How're we supposed to find anyone in all that?"

"This is a small settlement by most planets' standards," Padreic said mildly. "Just follow my directions and try not to look too conspicuous."

"Easy for you to say," Ben muttered, but eased the landspeeder forward. Beside him, Sasha all but climbed on top of her seat to gape.

Mos Espa was enormous. Hundreds of domed buildings huddled and twisted in on themselves, following curving streets that didn't seem to have any logic or reason behind them. The streets were full of pedestrians, vehicles, and creatures of all shapes and sizes fighting for room. Everyone seemed to be shouting - advertising wares, arguing, or yelling greetings and directions to each other. Ben was suddenly very grateful that Padreic had come along. The old man seemed to know exactly where everything was, but after the third or fourth turn through the crowded, unlabeled streets and alleys, Ben was hopelessly lost.

"Where are we going?" Sasha asked in what she probably thought was a whisper.

Padreic smiled and nodded to some sort of lumpy brown creature sitting against a wall, apparently selling the rusted junk piled in front of it. "I have a home here. It's small, but it will do."

Ben frowned. He hated it when plans changed. "What about going to our great-aunt's house?"

"We'll do that tomorrow, after we know exactly what trouble your uncle has got himself into." Padreic nodded to a squat little door, utterly indistinguishable from the dozens of others lining either side of the narrow alley. "Here we are. It would be best to get inside before dark."

It was hot and stuffy inside the tiny house - and, somehow, it seemed much smaller than Hermit's Hut had been. It was also much more cluttered. Every available surface overflowed with circuit boards, diagrams, and all kinds of oddities that Ben had never seen before. Piles of ventilators and eyepieces from the Sand People's masks balanced precariously on the remnants of a power droid. Coils of hair-thin silver wire flowed over what looked like a hoverball award and some kind of metal sphere before they disappeared under a giant pile of mismatched robes.

Padreic didn't seem terribly apologetic about the mess. He hobbled to the little kitchen - the one half-covered in flickering, half-tuned holoprojs - and began to pull things out of cabinets. "Bring your equipment inside," he said without looking back at them. "I have a place to hide the landspeeder, but it's best not to leave anything out in the open."

"There's no room for anything else here," Sasha muttered. Ben elbowed her in the arm, but all that did was make her mumble incoherently about how stupid he could be. At least she wasn't crying now.

By the time they hauled everything inside, Padreic had extracted a table and two completely different chairs from the mess. He laid out equally mismatched food, some of which Ben had never seen in his life, and gave the cousins an apologetic smile. "I'm afraid I won't be joining you. I still have errands I need to do."

Sasha scowled at him. "But my dad - "

"Nothing will happen to your father tonight. I'll find out if the garrison is looking for the two of you yet, and we'll figure out what to do from there. Until then," he added, and suddenly his voice was full of stern authority, "neither of you is to leave this place. Mos Espa is no place for settlers. Is that understood?"

Ben nodded and, just out of old habit, kicked Sasha's shin before she could argue with him.

Padreic smiled. The aura of great power and strength vanished as if it had never been. "If you will excuse me," he said with a nod. Without waiting for a reply, he turned and hobbled out of the house, sealing the door behind him.

He was hardly gone a moment before Sasha stood up. "This is  _stupid_. I'm gonna go find Dad."

"Do you know where the garrison is?" Ben tugged her back into her seat. "You heard Padreic. We've got to stay here."

"Since when are you listening to him? You don't trust him - I can tell!"

"Since I don't have any  _choice_." He scrubbed his face, desperately wishing that he could go home - or that he still had a home to go back to. "I'm not sure Padreic's what he says he is, but he hasn't turned us in so far."

"That's another thing. What makes you think the Imps are gonna want us? I know that Mom - " Her voice faltered for a moment, but she squared her shoulders and changed tactics. "What I mean is, we've only got Padreic telling us that the Imps would want to arrest us. We don't even know what they wanted!"

She kept talking after that, but Ben didn't hear her. Instead he heard that one sentence echoing in his head over and over again, growing steadily louder and more accusatory.

_"We don't even know what they wanted!"_

_I do._

"Sasha." He hardly recognized his own voice.

His cousin stopped mid-rant and stared at him. "What is it?"

With shaking hands, Ben dug through his pocket and produced the tiny, forgotten data chip. He set it on the table right next to the water pitcher. "That's it," he said softly. "That's what the Imps were looking for."

"It was  _you?_ " Sasha was on her feet again, but this time her hands were opening and closing convulsively, as if she wanted to throw something at him and was barely restraining herself. "First you've got the lightsaber and - and now  _this_  - Mom didn't have to die! You could've - "

"Sasha,  _stop_."

She did.

Ben rubbed at his stinging eyes. This was no time to get upset. Someone had to be the adult. "It's a data transmission. I don't know what's on it. I found it when I was fixing the holoproj. Do you remember that?"

For a second he thought that maybe she didn't, but then she nodded. "So I could watch the news broadcasts."

"So you could watch  _Thunder T.I.E.s_ ," he corrected. That almost got a smile out of her. "It was encoded. I couldn't read anything, so I saved it to look at later. I don't know what's on it, I swear."

Sasha shook her head and began to pace back and forth as much as the cramped little house allowed. "They must've been pretty desperate," she said at last.

"Who? The Imps?"

"Whoever sent that thing." She stopped by the pile of holoprojs, hugging herself as if to ward off a sudden chill. "I'd bet anything someone sent it during that battle me and Lora saw. It was almost over our heads, so - so maybe Draco's Well and Noon Ridge were the only settlements the transmitter could reach. Maybe it's a Rebel transmission! It could be important!"

Ben sighed. "There isn't a Rebellion anymore."

"That's not what Dad says."

"And did you ever stop to think that maybe that's why the Imps took him?" When Sasha just glared at him, he pocketed the data chip and pointedly attempted to go back to dinner, such as it was. "I'm not going to get rid of it, if that's what you're worried about."

"Are you gonna tell the Imps you have it?"

"No. Even if I wanted to," he added around a mouthful of something that had probably once been a fruit, "how would I explain why we ran away? The only reason to give it to them is if they'll give your dad back in exchange."

Sasha nodded and finally returned to her seat. "Can you at least  _try_  to decode it?"

Ben felt like banging his head on the tabletop. "I  _can't_." Sasha wilted, looking utterly dejected, which was probably what made him keep talking. "But maybe I can figure out who sent it. The carrier signal probably didn't have any codes."

Which meant he might be staying up all night, muttering and not-really-cursing under his breath as he wrestled with Padreic's unfamiliar holoproj collection - but Sasha looked happier, which made any inconvenience worth it.

"I'm sorry I ever called you boring," she said, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand.

It was probably intended as a compliment, so Ben smiled back at her and tried not to feel just a little offended.

* * *

Halfway across Mos Espa, Padreic the odd-jobs-man ducked his head and shuffled into the recesses of a cellar bar. He instantly stood out from the rest of the patrons - spacers, pod-racers, and smugglers, all of them - but no one seemed inclined to bother him. On the contrary, the regulars shuffled out of his way. Bent old man or not, he had an almost bottomless collection of rare, one-of-a-kind scrap, and there was no telling when his reasonably-priced scrounging might come in handy.

Cane clicking on the sticky floor, he aimed for a shadowed booth recessed in the far wall and didn't bother to ask permission as he awkwardly settled into the empty seat. "I'm getting too old for this."

The booth's other occupant gave him a look that would have been pure loathing if he had been able to focus his eyes. As it was, he shoved an enormous tankard of something corrosive out of his way and planted an elbow on the table. "What the hell do you want?"

"The pleasure of your company, of course. Can't a man visit an old friend?"

The only answer was a disbelieving snort.

Padreic shook his head in disgust and gingerly folded his hands on the tabletop. "I'm fortunate you're here now. I need your help."

"'Course you do." The man across the table didn't sound at all surprised. "Who've you dug your claws into now?"

"A pair of very interesting survivors from one of the Dune Sea settlements. A set of cousins, actually."

The reaction was immediate and might have been startling to anyone who hadn't been expecting it. Padreic had been, so he simply leaned back in his seat and watched the rapid emotions that flashed across his companion's face - some of which were very complicated.

Plain old-fashioned fury won out, judging by the way the man's lip curled back in a snarl. "If you think you can - "

"I can what? Sell them to the Empire?" Padreic suppressed a flash of anger - he would have reacted far worse than his companion was, had their situations been reversed - and managed to keep his voice steady and low. "You must know what happened to Gavin Darklighter by now. The garrison will start looking for his family shortly, once they figure out that he knows nothing. I've met people like Ben and Sasha. They invite trouble."

"Yeah, I noticed." The man ran his fingers through greying hair. "So what do you want me to do?"

"Get them off world before the garrison finds them. Perhaps your son could - "

The man's face hardened. "Mention him again and I'll kill you."

That, too, should have been expected. "Of course," Padreic said calmly. "My mistake. Will you take them off world or not?"

"Sure. Why not?" The man's sudden resolve vanished, replaced by a groggy drunk fumbling for his tankard. "What the hell did they do anyway?"

Ah. One of the  _easy_  answers. Padreic eased himself to his feet and leaned heavily on his cane. "Your guess is as good as mine. Given the situation, I'm assuming it's something bad."

"No wonder you're involved." The man gestured to the tankard. "You gonna cover this or what?"

"Pathetic," Padreic muttered, but the man didn't seem to be terribly offended. Possibly he hadn't heard him. Shaking his head, the odd-jobs-man dropped a few coins on the tabletop and began the long, painful walk back to his tiny home.


	3. Chapter 3

_"The Rebellion died with Organa. Its remnants will wither away once her son and his fellow traitors are apprehended. The last believers in the myth of the Republic are dying, if not already dead. Now is our time – our future."  
\- _Grand Moff Kayel Normindi Mar _, "Speech Delivered on the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Galactic Empire"_  


 _"By some estimates, Calrissian Shipping, its partners and its subsidiaries own or are owed no less than one-twentieth of all privately owned property in Mid-Rim Imperial space. Its freighters and tugs account for one-fifth of all government-funded bulk transport and one-quarter of armament shipments. Coupled with savvy investments and unmatched access to lucrative Imperial contracts, some might argue that it is currently the second-most-powerful entity in the entire galaxy."  
- _Mirkos Denoff'rin _,_ _Aiming For the Core: Inspirational Tales of Personal and Financial Success,_ Lumar & Goyd Inc. (a division of Calrissian Shipping Corporation)

* * *

 

Hal Horn hated Tatooine.

To be fair, he wasn't terribly fond of the last three planets he'd made deliveries on either – but  _this_  went above and beyond mere dislike. He loathed Tatooine for its unique awfulness, particularly its sand and its suns and most especially its sheer number of bars. No one needed that many damn bars.

Hal was twenty years old, tall as humans went, and technically under a death sentence in most of the Core. He was also on edge and had been ever since he had set foot on this hellhole of a planet two days before. Something unpleasant was nagging at the back of his head, as if he had forgotten a critical detail and his subconscious was just waiting for an unpleasant reminder to happen. It wasn't a nice feeling to have, especially when he knew perfectly well that his hunches carried slightly more weight than most people's. Under the circumstances, he felt he had every right to be cranky.

Of course, the fact that his captain was missing and presumed drunk wasn't helping his temper.

Muttering to himself, he unclipped his comlink from his belt and flicked it on. "Mel? I can't raise the captain. Is he back on the ship yet?"

The comlink hissed and crackled for a moment before his shipmate answered. "What's the matter? Not enjoying the sand?"

"Ha ha. Don't think I wouldn't rather be guarding the ship."

"With bad rations and a fragged-up droid for company?" Hal heard the poorly-hidden amusement in her voice. "I don't know where Solo is, but I want samples if he found anything good."

Hal rolled his eyes. "Just be ready to take off in a hurry."

"Expecting trouble?"

"Not really." He surveyed the crowded streets for a moment, but saw nothing more dangerous than what looked like a couple of local thugs. "Just a hunch."

"Don't try any of your fragging mind-tricks," she said – and although her voice was as light and unconcerned as ever, Hal caught the worried undercurrent. "I was checking the Imps' channels when you commed me. There's a cruiser overhead – one of the big ones. They took out two settlements last night looking for something."

At least now he knew where the constant sense of mortal peril was coming from. He dropped his voice almost to a whisper and hoped the noise from the crowd would keep anyone from overhearing. "Do you think Rage is up there?"

"Dunno. Don't much care, either – but I'm not saving your hide if you and Solo get yourselves caught."

"Love you too," Hal muttered, and heard her grumble something incoherent before he switched the comlink off.

Which left him right back where he had started: out looking for whatever bar his captain had picked, without any clue as to where to start. Only now there was a pressing time limit with the Imp cruiser overhead. Hal was worse than dead if the Imps caught him – but his captain?

He didn't want to think what Rage would do to Han.

He risked reaching out with the Force, searching the immediate area for anything that felt like a familiar presence. Mos Espa wasn't especially big to someone who had been born on Corellia, and the convoluted jumble of beings, sentient and otherwise, was slightly easier to handle than it might have been elsewhere. It was still a bit like trying to find a single rock in an uncharted asteroid field, but he hoped that Han's familiar presence would stand out.

It almost didn't. After a few moments of searching, Hal began to become aware of something on the periphery of his mind. It was nebulous and agitated and so huge that it took him a second to understand that it was a Force presence – and  _that_  realization made him stop dead in his tracks, never mind the crowd grumbling and swearing at him for blocking traffic. He circled it warily, wishing he had bothered to learn more than the bare basics from his father and Han's son, but whoever-it-was gave no sign of being aware of him. Nonetheless, Hal decided to err on the side of caution and kept away from it. If it was malicious, he didn't want to attract its attention.

As he edged away, his mind caught on a much smaller and much more familiar presence – Han, probably not fifty meters from where Hal was standing at that very moment. He allowed himself a shaky sigh of relief and hurried in that direction, glad to be away from yet another reason to hate this damn planet.

* * *

No matter what Sasha seemed to think, it wasn't hard for Ben to figure out where the mysterious message had come from. Most comm systems included some kind of identification code, or so Uncle Gavin had told him once. Unless someone had gone to the effort to remove it, that carrier code would tell him what kind of ship the message had been sent from and maybe even whom the ship was registered with.

Not that  _that_  necessarily meant anything, because it there was one thing Ben had learned working in the family garage, it was just how many stolen vehicles there were in the galaxy. Still, it was a start, and anything that made him and Sasha feel like they had some control over the situation couldn't be a bad thing.

He was lucky enough to have spare parts handy, so it only took a short while and a couple of holoprojs salvaged from Padreic's scrap piles before Ben had the carrier code readout flickering in front of him. He grinned at Sasha and tilted the slightly warped screen toward her so she could see. "It's even got the ship's serial number on it."

"Looks like some kinda space yacht," Sasha said. "I don't know that manufacturer. Y'nafit Limited?" She shrugged and sat back in her seat. "Sounds expensive."

"It would be if it's a space yacht." Ben propped his chin on his hand and scrolled through the data. "Here. I think I've got a name."

"You're kidding." Sasha scrambled out of her chair and around the table so she could peer over his shoulder. "Who is it?"

"I don't know if this is the person who sent the message, but the ship's registered with someone named Jessa Calrissian."

"The shipping company kind of Calrissian?" Sasha reached over his shoulder and tapped the screen, calling up a grainy, off-color license picture of a pretty black-haired girl. "She looks kinda young to be owning a space yacht."

"Not if her family owns a whole company." Ben peered at the picture for a moment. Sasha was right; Jessa Calrissian didn't look any older than he was. Despite the quality of the license picture, and despite the fact that she was only wearing a simple hairclip to pull her long braids out of her face, she had the poised look rich people had sometimes - of someone who was used to getting their way. He wondered if she was the one who had sent the message. Had she been attacked or ambushed over Draco's Well, or was she somewhere on one of the wealthy Core worlds, waiting to find out exactly what had happened to her ship? For her sake, he hoped it was the latter.

"It's not a very good secret message," Sasha said as he pocketed the data chip and began to carefully disassemble the holoprojs. "I mean, you'd think that a Rebel would know better than to leave the carrier code in."

"We don't know that it's a Rebel message," Ben said, although without nearly as much conviction as before. "And think about it for a second. If you're in the middle of a battle, are you going to take the time to erase a carrier code?"

"I'd take it off before any battles happened."

Ben stopped disconnecting uplink cables long enough to blink up at her. "Where did you learn about secret messages, anyway?"

She mumbled something that might have been " _Thunder T.I.E.s._ "

"I knew it."

Sasha graciously waited until he'd replaced the assorted holoprojs before she threw a cup at him.

* * *

Han Solo's bar of choice was dank and smelled like some kind of suspicious fungus. It was also extremely crowded. There seemed to be entire portions of Mos Espa's population that only emerged in the afternoon, stumbling upright just long enough to find the nearest drug and then passing out in a heap on an inevitably sticky floor. Hal picked his way over a couple of the prone bodies and hoped like hell that whatever he was stepping in was just a few spilled drinks as he elbowed his way through the crowd. It would have been fairly easy to disperse them with a well-chosen illusion, but he had taken enough chances just using the Force to find his captain.

Still, he knew Han well enough to angle for the darkest corner of the bar. He found him sitting at a grimy booth with one arm absently slung over the backrest, staring at a foul-looking drink that, remarkably enough, seemed untouched.

"We've got a new job," his captain said without bothering to look up at Hal. "Passengers. Shouldn't be too hard."

Hal slid into the booth and ducked his head low – stupid, but he wasn't taking any chances with an Imp cruiser in orbit. "I thought we didn't take passengers."

"Yeah, well." Han shrugged. "I got a favor called in."

Even without the Force, Hal would have known there was more to it than that. The lines etched into Han's face were even more pronounced than usual, and there was something about his expression – something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite despair either – that he only seemed to get when the Imps were around.

Which meant asking for more details was out of the question. Hal settled for propping his chin on one hand and frowning at a point over Han's shoulder, keeping what he thought of as a mental ear open for anything unusual. "What kind of passengers?"

"Dumb kids. Pair of cousins." Han grimaced and reached for his drink as he spoke, but then seemed to think better of it and withdrew his hand. "We just gotta drop them off, and then we can get back to the cargo runs."

Hal sighed. Getting information out of his captain was damn near impossible sometimes. "Mel says the Imps took out two settlements last night," he said absently, as if discussing the weather.

If he hadn't known Han for so long, he would have missed the telltale flicker that passed across his face. "I heard."

"These wouldn't be a pair of dumb  _settler_  kids, would they?"

Han's mouth twitched into a humorless smile. "You have to ask?"

Of course he didn't. Damn it. Hal leaned further forward and lowered his voice. "We can't do this job."

"I already took it."

"Then give it back. There's – " How was he supposed to explain this to someone so Force-deaf? "There's something wrong here. This planet's felt off ever since we landed, and it just keeps getting worse. It's like we're about to fly into an ambush, Han."

Han just raised an eyebrow at him. "You sure it's not just the stormtroopers tearing up the place?"

"No," he admitted, "I'm not, but I don't think it matters. I felt a presence here on the planet just now. Not Rage," he added when Han shifted fractionally, as if reaching for his blaster. "It's someone else – and it's strong."

"'Course it is," Han muttered. He reached up with one hand and scrubbed at his face. "We're taking the job. I can't change that, so don't get jumpy on me."

"I'd feel better if you came back to the ship with me," Hal said. "Mel's wondering where you are."

"Mel's three seconds from taking the ship and marooning us both," Han corrected, but Hal's blatant lie had the desired effect. He levered himself out of his seat, an exhausted-looking, grizzled man with stubble on his face and an age-old spice stain on his shirt. "You're too damn worried all the time."

"Someone needs to be. I've got a bad feeling about this."

Han shook his head, wincing at what had to be the beginning of an impressive headache. "You'll be all right."

Coming from his captain, that was practically a grin and a hearty slap on the shoulder – and maybe it would have cheered Hal up if the sense of dread hadn't suddenly loomed up stronger than ever, determined to choke him.

* * *

Ben had only just finished carefully replacing the last holoproj when Padreic came hobbling home. He stopped in the doorway for a moment, staring at both cousins as if he had never seen anything quite like them before, and then made his way to one of the mismatched chairs. "You two should be asleep."

"We didn't want to take your cot," Ben said, which he supposed was technically true. He certainly wasn't about to explain the carrier code and the Calrissian girl.

"Fair enough." Padreic eased himself into the chair and leaned his cane against the table, his hands folded in his lap. "I've arranged for your transport off world. I trust Captain Solo and his crew to look after you."

Ben heard Sasha gasp behind him, but pushed both that and the nagging suspicion that he ought to know that name out of his head for the time being. "We're not going off world."

Padreic scowled at him. "You are as soon as the Empire takes more of an interest in you than it already has. It's what your uncle would want me to do."

"Can't we just stay with our great-aunt?" Sasha asked. She sounded annoyed – and really, with all the sudden out-of-nowhere changes Padreic had pulled on them, Ben couldn't exactly blame her.

"When the Empire decides to come after you – and it will, with far more than just one garrison – it will never leave you alone." Padreic's voice was very quiet and his eyes never left Ben's face. "I know you found a message of some kind. Don't look at me like that," he added when Sasha opened her mouth, although he didn't glance back at her. "I know Imperial search-and-contain procedures when I see them. I don't know what information you saw. I don't care either, but the Empire does. Even they don't destroy two settlements on a whim."

Ben reached into his pocket and curled his fingers around the data chip, which suddenly seemed like the heaviest thing in the universe. "What if I just gave it back to them?"

"You  _can't_ ," Sasha snapped. "You already said so."

"She's right," Padreic said. "The Empire would eliminate you and likely Sasha as well, to remove all possible witnesses. The only reason your uncle is still alive is because he might know what became of that message. Even if you're just arrested, you will draw the Emperor's attention – and when that happens, he will destroy you."

For a second Ben couldn't even form words. "The  _Emperor?_ " he finally managed to choke out. If the rest of the situation hadn't been so serious, he would have laughed.

Sasha folded her arms, just like Aunt Olivea had when she'd caught one of the settlement's children in a blatant lie. "Of  _course_  we're gonna get the Emperor's attention – but it's 'cause of who you picked to take us off world, not 'cause of this message."

Padreic's smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "Your father's told you stories."

"Sasha?" Between Padreic talking about the Emperor being interested in him and Sasha bringing up – well, he wasn't sure  _what_  she was bringing up – Ben felt as if there was an entirely separate conversation happening just out of earshot. "What are you talking about?"

His cousin made a face at him. "Just 'cause you never liked Dad's stories doesn't mean there isn't lots of true stuff in them. You know the one he tells us about Luke Skywalker, right?"

"You mean the one about Darth Rage? I guess." And he did know it, sort of. Uncle Gavin's stories hadn't been like the ones other parents in Draco's Well told their children. In Uncle Gavin's stories, Old Kenobi was a wise hermit instead of a vengeful ghost, and Skywalker's sudden, inexplicable defection to the Empire was something more akin to a personal betrayal than a simple, inevitable fact. Ben had always privately thought that Uncle Gavin took the Skywalker story a little too close to heart, and so he had never really listened to it once he was old enough to tinker with things.

But Sasha had. Uncle Gavin's stories were the only things she knew better than her beloved  _Thunder T.I.E.s_  episodes. She rounded on Padreic triumphantly, eyes narrowed and jaw set. "Captain Solo was one of Darth Rage's old Rebel friends. He's wanted in lots of systems, and if the Empire finds us with him, then they'll think we're just as bad as he is."

Padreic didn't seem at all surprised. "And how do you know this is the same Captain Solo?"

"'Cause if he's wanted all over Imp space, no one else is gonna be stupid enough to use his name." She stopped for a moment, head tilted to one side. "Why's  _he_  using it?"

"His ship is registered under another name. He and I are..." Padreic hesitated, shrugging his shoulders. "We've had our disagreements, but he knows I have no reason to betray him, and he in turn will not betray either of you."

Which brought them back to what Ben felt was the important point. "Why did you say that about me and the Emperor?"

Padreic smiled up at him, and the expression was gentle and sad and made Ben's skin crawl. "Do you know why Luke Skywalker left this planet?"

"Because he wanted to?"

"He found a Rebel message, just like you."

The data chip suddenly got even heavier. "Oh."

"There's more. Darth Rage's first mentor was a Jedi, possibly one of the greatest Jedi to ever live. On Tatooine, he was known as Ben Kenobi." The smile vanished. "Your namesake, if I'm not mistaken."

Ben shook his head, as if that would somehow make his world fall back into some semblance of order. "I'm named after a Jedi?"

"Aunt Rasca named you Ben 'cause she always liked the stories about Old Kenobi," Sasha said. "Dad told me." She glared at Padreic, as if she had abruptly decided that the entire situation was somehow his fault. "What does that matter anyway? It's not as if she did it on purpose. She didn't know Old Kenobi was a Jedi. No one here does."

"But Rage does. The Emperor does. They won't care about your aunt's reasons." Padreic's shoulders slumped, and for a moment he simply stared at Ben, who could only keep shaking his head at the nonsense of it all. When the odd-jobs-man spoke again, his voice was hoarse with some unidentifiable emotion. "They are not men who can afford to believe in coincidences, Ben. Should you be identified by the garrison, it will only be a matter of time until you come to their attention. The Emperor will see you as a threat to him, just as he once saw Rage as a threat, and one way or another, he will destroy you."

"But he's not a threat to anybody!" Sasha rested a hand on Ben's arm, almost as if she wanted to reassure him that she was still there. "He couldn't hit a stranded sandcrawler with the carbine and he always flies the landspeeder too slow and – and  _I'm_  more dangerous than he is!"

Padreic said nothing, which was somehow worse than any more horrible explanations. Ben leaned heavily against the wall, half-supported by Sasha, and covered his face with shaking hands. He wanted very much to tell the odd-jobs-man how stupid the entire conversation had just sounded and how he wasn't going anywhere – how he was going to exchange the data chip for Uncle Gavin and then take them all to his great-aunt's so they could mourn properly and start rebuilding.

But he couldn't. The words wouldn't come. Some instinct told him that what Padreic had said was all too true.

"We..." Sasha's voice shook a little, but she tightened her grip on his arm. Ben hardly noticed. It was as if the past couple days had caught up with him all in one moment - all the fear and hurt that he'd pushed away so he could be the sensible practical one and keep Sasha safe - and he wasn't sure he trusted himself to stand, much less speak. "What about the lightsaber we found?"

"I don't think you should leave it with me," Padreic said softly.

"But it's a Jedi weapon, isn't it? It could get Ben in more trouble if – "

"The Emperor will expect him to have one, should he decide to search for him."

Ben lowered his hands just enough to stare at Padreic. "He'll think I'm a Jedi too? Just because of what my name is?"

"A potential Jedi, yes. Whether or not he would be right is another matter entirely, but he will believe it. That is why it is imperative that you and your message leave Tatooine the moment the garrison identifies you, with or without your uncle."

"What if they don't identify us?"

"Then we will try to free your uncle first," Padreic said, although he didn't sound very happy about that. "No matter what happens, you will both be on your way to a Rebel base by this time tomorrow." He climbed slowly to his feet, wincing as he flexed stiff fingers. "It would be best if you both got some sleep. There is another cot in the bedroom storage closet if you need it."

Ben felt that he could have said something else – maybe an apology for destroying any remaining sense of safety, or some sort of reassurance that everything would turn out all right.  _Anything._ But all he did was hobble off to a far corner of the house, disappearing through what might have been a doorway or might have been just a shadow in the piles of junk, and the cousins were alone again.

"You can't be a Jedi." There was a strain in Sasha's voice, as if she was trying her best to be calm and not really succeeding. It made her seem younger than she really was. "He's full of – and you're – " She stared up at him, wide-eyed and angry and terrified. "The Imps  _kill_  Jedi, Ben."

"I'm not a Jedi." He didn't have to try to keep his voice calm now, because if there was anything he was still certain about, it was that. "It'll be okay."

"Dad'll kill me if you get in trouble," she said. "You're the one who behaves." And then her watery smile dissolved and she started blotting at her eyes with her sleeve.

Ben wasn't sure why one of her old misadventures came suddenly to mind – only that he remembered how scared she had been, because even five-year-olds weren't exempt from severe punishment if they broke the vaporator. He'd sat and hugged her for a while before he'd shown her that she'd just reset it. At the time, it had been the only thing he could think of.

He wasn't ten now and this was a lot bigger than a vaporator, but he still wasn't sure what to say to her. So he put an arm around her instead and wished, desperately and uselessly, that his uncle and aunt were there to do the same for him.


	4. Chapter 4

_"Leia Organa was a criminal and a traitor, but make no mistake, she was just as sane as you or I. It is impossible to study her actions without first understanding that she attempted to revive the order of Jedi charlatans not out of a desire for power or prestige, but out of a genuine conviction that she had been left with no alternatives. Desperation makes ordinary people do extraordinary things."  
-_ Luis Vesh _,_ "Lecture on the Cult of the Jedi"

 _Captain Fantastik: Don't worry. We're not in trouble yet._  
Lieutenant Drai: We're surrounded and we're down to survival rations - pardon me, sir, but when are _we in trouble?_  
\- Captain Fantastik and the Thunder T.I.E.s , Episode 93 _, "The Pirates of Manday Prime"  
_

* * *

 

The second-most-powerful being in the entire galaxy was quiet and slightly built, with a forgettable face and an easygoing smile. He wore a plain black uniform instead of long cloaks or old-fashioned armor, and his only concession to his high rank was the lightsaber hanging unobtrusively at his side. At first glance he looked harmless and almost boyish, but the men and women of the Imperial Navy had heard too many stories about him to place much stock in appearances. Darth Rage's temper, though rarely seen, was just as legendary as his soft-spoken, efficient ruthlessness.

At that moment, there was only one person on the Star Destroyer  _Retaliator_  who wasn't afraid of him - and that, Rage knew, was because she was too sheltered and naive to know better.

"This is outrageous," the girl said, never mind that she was the one handcuffed, flanked by stormtroopers and forcibly seated in one of the debriefing room's hard-backed chairs. "I know a power grab when I see one. I assure you that once you buffoons decide to set me free, I'll see all of you in a court of law!"

Rage had heard all this before, ever since the  _Retaliator_  had taken the girl and her ship into custody. She was, he had to admit, extremely good at sticking to a story. The standard day of sleep deprivation and the starvation rations had left her looking a little haggard, but no less willing to lie through her teeth.

At least she was entertaining. Over the course of the past decade he'd sat across from many prisoners, and he'd heard everything from pleading to defiance to clumsy attempts at bribery. This was the first time someone had threatened to sue him.

He leaned forward, folding his hands on the polished desk in front of him. "Maybe I wasn't clear," he said calmly. "You were caught transmitting classified files. That's high treason, which places you under the Imperial Navy's jurisdiction."

"Of course it does," the girl muttered, although she didn't quite meet his eyes.

"Anything I choose to do to you is perfectly legal," he continued as if she hadn't spoken. He smiled, well aware that the expression was patient and long-suffering and, in its own way, truly terrifying. "If I wanted to throw you in an airlock and subject you to slow decompression, for example, no one would object."

She had exceptional self-control. Except for a slight widening of her eyes, there was no sign of the terror he felt rippling through the Force. "There's no need for threats," she said, although there was the faintest tremor in her voice. "I'm sure we can work this out like civilized beings."

"There is nothing to work out. You are to be taken to a detention center, interrogated, and executed for treason."

"That's ridiculous! My father will never – "

Ah. There it was. Rage held out his hand and waited until his assistant stepped forward and handed him a prepared datapad. "Your father. That would be Lando Calrissian of Calrissian Shipping, yes?"

She nodded stiffly.

"The same father who disowned you last year?" He glanced at the datapad, although there was really no need. "It was over a contract with the Empire, wasn't it? Something about weapons shipments?" He smiled again, although there was no humor behind it. "I've met your father. He's a smart man. Do you really think he would jeopardize his entire company just to save one Rebel agent?"

He waited, but the girl stared down at her clenched hands and said nothing. If he hadn't been so practiced at reading people, he would have missed the fact that her shoulders were starting to shake.

His smile vanished as he handed the datapad back, his gaze never leaving his prisoner. "We've searched and destroyed both of the settlements in your broadcast range. There's no point in lying to me. Who gave you those files? What was in them? Where did you send them?"

She lifted her head and stared at a fixed point over his shoulder. "I don't know."

"You risked your life to protect them. Do you think I'm going to believe you don't know what they were?" When she said nothing, Rage sighed and gestured to the stormtroopers flanking her. It was clear that her much-lauded civilized approach wasn't going to get him anywhere. "Take her back to the detention bay."

Almost before she had been escorted out of the room, his assistant stepped forward with another datapad in hand. "We've compiled a list of probable settlers, my lord. Only probable – the records aren't always reliable."

Rage nodded for her to follow him as he walked out of the debriefing room. "What did you find?"

"Very little." She didn't look up from her datapad as she navigated the corridors, but she never once needed to glance up to find her footing or to avoid passing officers and crewmen. Even on the polished metal decks, her boots made no sound. "The Mos Espa garrison has taken a man named Gavin Darklighter into custody. He and his wife resisted attempts to enter their home, and he appears to be the only owner of a holoprojector in either of the targeted settlements."

For a moment Rage wondered why he wasn't surprised that a Darklighter was involved somehow. "Has he revealed anything?"

"Nothing yet, my lord. An first-response team is scheduled to arrive at the garrison in shortly. Based on their findings, we will have a fully debriefed interrogation team en route by midday tomorrow." She sidestepped a pair of blue-suited maintenance technicians and stepped over a small droid. "There is some evidence that Darklighter had children who have thus far managed to elude our search teams. Patrol TX-194 reports finding a disassembled water vaporator registered with Darklighter not far from the settlement, and the family's landspeeder is missing."

Rage nodded. Regardless of whether or not Calrissian's transmission had been an act of desperation, the information she had stolen was heavily classified and should have been for the Emperor's eyes only. Even he, Palpatine's personal representative, did not know its contents. Leaving potential witnesses alive was out of the question – especially on Tatooine, which seemed to produce more than its fair share of troublemakers. If Biggs' extended family was involved somehow, the transmission would almost certainly find its way into the Rebellion's hands.

"Do these children have names?" he asked.

"No, my lord, but they do have faces." Yet another datapad materialized "This was taken from a holo found in the wife's belongings. The search teams believe these individuals may be the fugitives we're looking for."

He accepted the datapad without glancing at it. "Distribute copies to the teams and have them expand their search to the spaceports – house by house, Lieutenant. Instruct them to use whatever means they deem necessary. I want those files found."

"And Calrissian?"

At least he didn't have to worry about tracking that particular problem down. "Have an interrogation droid prepared."

"My lord." She bowed at the waist, turned crisply on her heel, and disappeared down a side corridor. For the time being, Rage was alone.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting when he glanced down at the picture of the fugitives. Maybe versions of Biggs, dark hair and mustache and all. Instead a girl with a sun-bleached braid beamed up at him, her waving arms all but obscuring a round-faced, patient-looking older boy with dark red hair. Neither of them looked any older than he had been when he had first left Tatooine. The girl especially was little more than a child.

They were perhaps the least likely Rebels he had ever seen – if that was indeed what they were.

His assistant had been nothing if not thorough. The datapad contained bits and pieces of information, everything Tatooine's haphazard records could reveal about the family. In this particular case, it hadn't been very much at all. Gavin Darklighter's settlement had made Anchorhead look like a bustling metropolis, and its inhabitants were suspicious of and close-mouthed around outsiders, even when questioned at the end of blaster rifles. Nonetheless, the carefully cobbled-together data indicated that the family had made supply purchases consistent with the needs of four people. Whoever the boy and girl were, they had been living in one of the targeted settlements – and somehow, apparently without any outside help, they had thus far eluded the finest search teams in the Empire.

Rage frowned down at the picture again, particularly at the boy, who was probably the one behind the escape simply by virtue of being so much older than his companion. Perhaps he had wanted to leave his settlement and his planet behind and had ill-advisedly seized on Calrissian's message as a way out. Perhaps he had been part of a fledgling Rebel cell out of some misguided attempt to imitate his famous relative.

Or perhaps the boy had simply panicked at the sight of Imperial stormtroopers and ran, taking his sister along with him. Tatooine wasn't a Core world. Who knew what kind of stories he had heard about the Empire?

 _True stories_ , some part of Rage's mind answered. He ignored it with practiced ease.

He shut the datapad off and tucked it under an arm, attempting to put the young fugitives out of his head. Something about all of this was making him uneasy – a ripple in the Force, part presence and part premonition, which seemed to slip from his grasp every time he reached for it. He tried to push the feeling away. The boy and girl could not elude the search teams forever, and when they were found his lingering questions about them would be answered.

The sooner the Empire was done with this planet, the better.

* * *

Han Solo made a habit of sleeping in his cockpit. It was probably some kind of survival skill – an unconscious way of keeping his head on his shoulders for another day – but after so many years, he'd decided it was pretty damn comfortable, too. There was something quiet and reassuring about the blinking readouts and the faint thrum of the power supply. It was a constant. He was used to it.

"Kriffing whoreson of a three-faced mother-loving –  _frag!_ "

Even if it was hard to get a good night's sleep in it.

Han sighed and didn't bother to open his eyes, much less move his feet off the controls. He knew that sooner or later his gunner would probably come marching in to tell him exactly what she was upset about, and in the meantime he would just have to wonder where she'd picked up that vocabulary. There was no rest to be had until she was done, at any rate. Whatever else she lacked, she made up for it with a healthy set of lungs.

A few moments later someone stomped into the cockpit and settled into the copilot's seat – someone who was far too quiet to be Melody. Han deigned to crack an eye open and glanced over long enough to see Hal frowning out the viewport, his chin propped on one fisted hand.

"Not much of a view," he said idly. "You've seen one docking bay wall, you've seen 'em all."

Hal's mouth twisted. "This one's worse than usual." Then, with more feeling, "I  _hate_  this planet."

"Yeah, I noticed." Han wasn't too fond of it himself, but he didn't feel like elaborating and his copilot knew better than to ask.

Not that that stopped Hal from bringing up other things. "We're not getting paid for these passengers, are we." It wasn't a question.

Han shrugged. "Like I said, I got a favor called in."

"A favor's running an extra crate for no charge. Han, this is  _insane_."

At least they agreed on something. "What'd Mel break this time?"

"Don't change the subject."

Han looked at him – really looked this time – and then immediately wished he hadn't. Hal didn't look old, exactly, but he was getting the aged expression that Jedi seemed to acquire far too quickly. Kenobi'd had it. So had Leia near the end, and so had some of her apprentices. He was pretty damn sure his son had it by now.

Somewhere along the line he'd come to associate it with bounty notices and betrayals and messy deaths. Seeing it on Hal's face made him start to wonder how long the boy would last against Rage, and thinking like that made him want to slink somewhere safe and dark and never come out.

Maybe Hal sensed some of that, because he quickly turned his gaze back to the viewport. "Mel fried the lateral controls."

Just like that, they were back on safe ground. Han ran a hand down his face and wondered why he put up with this kind of crew. "I don't want her near the nav systems."

"I tried to keep her away." Hal sounded long-suffering, but for someone who was usually so good at concealing his emotions, he wasn't doing a very good job of hiding a fond, soft smile.

Han decided not to mutter about lovesick idiots. He didn't need his copilot being defensive and insulted on top of everything else. "You get her away from those systems. I mean it. I don't want another Nar Shaddaa incident."

"It wasn't  _that_  big of an explosion and it's not my fault the jailers didn't speak – "

" _Hal._ "

He held up his hands. "Artoo already took it away from her. I swear."

That explained the profanity, anyway. "So we'll be ready for takeoff?"

"Just as soon as these passengers of yours show up, yeah." He shifted in his seat, his fingers lacing and unlacing behind his head. "Is one of them the presence I felt before?"

"I don't know," Han said, and in a very real way he was telling the truth. He knew next to nothing about the Force, other than the fact that he'd never seen a thing to indicate it was light or good or whatever the Jedi had called it. But he knew plenty about hiding people from it, so he stopped for a moment to collect his thoughts, listening to the reassuring thrum of the backup systems and the familiar sounds of Melody calling a certain astromech droid's parentage into question. "Look," he said at last, "I don't want you doing anything stupid – but let me know if you feel that presence again. Could be trouble."

Hal's smile was thin and tired. "I've already got an ear open."

Han nodded and closed his eyes, although there was little point in trying to get any sleep now. He'd seen enough of that too-old, haunted expression on too many people's faces. He had no desire to watch it sneak back and ghost across Hal's.

* * *

Ben woke up with his heart racing, half-expecting to hear Imps breaking down the front door and to see blaster barrels pointed down at him. His dream – a terrifying hodgepodge of screaming giants and gleaming broken machines and a not-quite-familiar woman with dark braided hair – splintered and vanished with one last stomach-twisting stab of dread. For a moment the woman's urgent whispers almost drowned out the sound of his shallow breaths, but it was as if he were hearing her through a tunnel, and her echoing words tumbled into each other until they were incomprehensible.

Then she was gone too, and all that was left was a sick, undirected sense of overpowering fear. Ben squeezed his eyes shut and reminded himself of all the little details he had to take care of, like cleaning the carbine and sorting through the emergency kit. Only when the feeling of imminent danger had faded to a sort of dull, ever-present worry did he lift his head.

As soon as he did, he felt incredibly stupid. He was in Padreic's cramped, cluttered bedroom, stretched out on a dusty cot that probably hadn't been used in years, if not decades. The machines here were tiny and old and anything but gleaming, and the only sounds were the distant whine of landspeeders and Sasha's soft snores. There was certainly no strange whispering woman.

 _It's cold_. He pushed himself up, barely suppressing a shiver, and began to fumble for his boots.  _Why is it so cold in here?_

At least he knew how to handle a malfunctioning cooling system. In fact, he knew four different ways of repairing one – six if temporary patch-jobs counted, and maybe more if he were given enough time and a few extra tools. He ran through all of them as he picked his way around Padreic's scrap piles toward the bedroom door. He liked machines, even broken ones. They didn't have strange messages or funny stories mucking things up.

Just then he almost envied them.

The main room was no warmer. If anything, it was so cold that Ben wished he'd taken the blanket from his cot. There was no light except for the faint blue-green glow given off by the half-repaired holoprojs. They backlit Padreic, who was sitting in one of the mismatched chairs with his hands clasped in front of him and his face shadowed by the cowl of his long brown robe. If he noticed the chill, he didn't seem very concerned about it.

"You're up early," he said without lifting his head.

Ben folded his arms in front of him, elbows cupped against his palms, and gingerly stepped out of the shadows. "Your cooling system isn't working right. I thought maybe – "

"It's fine."

"It's freezing," he said as politely as he could.

Padreic shifted in his seat. "To you, perhaps. The cooling system is fine."

"Then why is it so  _cold_  in here?"

"Did you know your uncle was a pilot?"

Ben stared at him, thrown by the sudden change of topic. What did that have to do with anything? He shook his head, trying and failing to picture Uncle Gavin flying anything bigger than a landspeeder. "He was?"

"Years ago, before the Empire sank its claws into the Outer Rim. He was restless," he added softly. "Very restless."

Yet again, Ben completely failed to picture his uncle as anything but down-to-earth. For a moment he wondered if maybe Padreic was talking about someone else entirely, but then he remembered Sasha and supposed her attitude must have come from somewhere. "If you say so."

"Your family breeds explorers, Ben – even if those explorers decide it's in their best interests to come home." The odd-jobs-man's voice was peculiar and detached, as if he wasn't really aware what he was saying. "You must feel you're the odd one out."

Ben frowned at him. "You mean because I don't want to leave Tatooine?" He decided to take Padreic's silence as a yes and shrugged. "I'll leave if it'll keep Sasha safe, but I don't think I'd be much good out there."

He felt more than saw the old man smile. "And you want to do good."

"I think I ought to, as long as I'm around. I'm no explorer."

"What are you, then?"

"A mechanic."

To his surprise, Padreic laughed – not a pleasant sound at all – and shook his head. "Of course." Then he sobered and lifted his head, and the half-light from the holoprojs threw his lined face into stark relief. "Rage is here."

"In Mos Espa?"

"Above us." His eyes glittered beneath his hood. Just for a moment, Ben couldn't tell what color they were.

The fear from before began to creep back. "How do you know?"

Given Padreic's strange, changeable mood, he had almost expected to hear some inexplicable reason – that he just  _knew_ , maybe. Instead the old man slowly climbed to his feet, and the sense of overwhelming wrongness shrank back to its usual vague presence in the back of Ben's mind. "The Empire should take more pains to guard their transmissions," he said. "Even their coded ones."

Ben grimaced. With the way his luck had been these past couple days, he wasn't even surprised. "They sent something about me and Sasha."

"Indeed. I would rather not explain this more than once," he added, withdrawing a small holoproj from his cloak. "Please wake your cousin."

Ben turned and hurried back into the bedroom. The nagging feeling that Padreic was losing his mind – that he hadn't really been talking about Uncle Gavin at all – faded away, forgotten, in the face of more pressing concerns.

By the time Sasha stumbled out of the bedroom, Padreic had piled Ben's toolkit and a pair of antique-looking blaster pistols onto the kitchen counter. All of the holoprojs had been shut off except the little one from his robes, which projected an enlarged, off-color image into the air above it. Ben noticed it immediately, partly because it was now the only illumination in the room – but mostly because it was of him.

"That's from Mom's holo," Sasha whispered. "Ben, what – ?"

"The Imps must've found it." He barely recognized his own voice, which sounded oddly strangled. He could picture exactly where the holo had sat on Aunt Olivea's shelf, right between the fancy Lady's Day dishes and the goblets from her mother's wedding. It was out of date – Sasha was much taller now and her braid was longer – but Ben still looked very much like himself.

Padreic looked up from his rummaging and folded his hands inside the sleeves of his long brown robe. "That is an Imperial transmission from the Star Destroyer  _Retaliator_ , which is currently in orbit directly over Mos Espa. Captain Solo and his crew intercepted it." He glanced at the holo for a moment, his lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. "The Imperial teams will be starting a house-to-house search here in Mos Espa – within the next quarter-chrono, I'd say. If we're very lucky, they haven't cordoned off the docking bays already."

"But – " Sasha's mouth opened and closed for a moment before she found words. "They'll come after my dad if they can't get us! We can't just leave him!"

"I will do what I can for your father." Padreic scooped up the blaster pistols. "I hope you will never need these," he said as he thrust the weapons at them, "but if you ever do, they are much more powerful than your carbine. And Ben," he added, extracting the lightsaber from the toolkit. "I would keep this as well."

Ben fumbled with the weapons and nearly dropped both of them before he managed to attach them both to his belt. Then he sealed up the toolkit and clipped it on too, as much for its familiar weight as for any possible use it could have. "Where are we going to go? You said something about a Rebel base, but we can't - "

"I'm sure you can work that out with Captain Solo." Padreic waited patiently until Sasha had finished buckling her blaster on and then looked from one cousin to the other. "You can trust him and his crew, but do not place your lives in the hands of anyone or anything else." He seemed about to add something, but sighed instead, his gaze locked on Ben. "I need you to promise me something, for your uncle's sake."

Ben tried to swallow around the sudden lump in his throat. "I promised him I wouldn't do anything stupid, if that's what you mean."

"That isn't what I had in mind," Padreic said, although the corners of his mouth twitched. "Promise me that your uncle will know you the next time he sees you."

What kind of demand was that? "I'm not going to turn into a krayt dragon or anything." The odd-jobs-man's face clouded over, so he sighed and stared at his scuffed boots. "I promise Uncle Gavin will know who I am."

Padreic didn't look entirely convinced, but he nodded and gestured to the front door. "This way, both of you – and do try to be quiet. We have patrols to avoid."

* * *

In the dim grey light Mos Espa's streets seemed larger and more foreboding than before. They were also far less crowded. Ben kept close to Sasha and tried not to stare too hard at the tough-looking, very clearly armed beings who scowled at him as he hurried past. He wished they could have taken the landspeeder, but Padreic had refused to reveal where or even how he had hidden it. The old man thought it would be more noticeable or more likely to be searched by Imp patrols – and he was probably right, but that didn't make Ben any happier about walking.

The streets grew wider and more crowded as they drew closer to the center of the spaceport and as the sky brightened. Ben kept track of Sasha by the simple means of grabbing her braid when she started to get too far ahead of him. Spotting Padreic wasn't as much of a problem; his distinctive hobble-walk was hard to miss no matter how many people Ben had to maneuver around, and he was so tall that his white-haired head poked out of the crowd.

"Do you think we're ever gonna see Dad again?" Sasha asked, her voice hushed and barely audible over the noise.

Ben wanted to tell her that of course they would, because he was Uncle Gavin and he was too sensible and careful to just disappear – but that hadn't saved Aunt Olivea, now had it? "Padreic will try and help him."

"I thought you didn't trust Padreic."

"I trust him more than the Imps," he said, which seemed to be all that mattered at the moment. He didn't have time to wonder if Padreic really had been hired by the Anchorhead Darklighters – an idea that seemed less and less likely as time went on – and why he was so willing to risk his life to save two settlers he barely knew and certainly wasn't friends with. Whatever his reasons, the odd-jobs-man really was trying to help them. Of that Ben was absolutely sure. He just didn't feel smart enough or awake enough to work out the whys of it.

"Do you think he knew your dad?" Sasha asked suddenly.

He stopped mid-fret and stared at her. "What?"

"Padreic, I mean. Do you think he knew him?"

Where in the galaxy had  _that_  idea come from? "Of course not. Why would he?"

"He knows lots about you, Ben – and I know you're gonna say it's 'cause he visited Draco's Well," she added when the obvious retort sprang to mind, "but I don't think that's it. Where'd he find out about all that stuff about Old Kenobi?"

If they hadn't been in the middle of wading through early-morning market crowds, Ben might have stopped and found a wall to bang his head on. "Maybe because he's old too? They probably traded scrap or something."

"But he was talking about – you know." Ben decided she probably meant the Emperor and Darth Rage, but he didn't have time to ask her, because she was still whispering with barely a pause for breath. "And – and he told you all that stuff about trouble you could get into."

"...and?"

She leaned closer and dropped her voice so low that he almost couldn't hear her. "And maybe it's 'cause your dad was a Jedi."

Right. That did it. "He was not!"

"Says who?"

"Says everyone! He was a smuggler or something!"

"But if he  _was_  a Jedi, he wouldn't go telling everyone, now would he?"

Feeling very put-upon, Ben grabbed Sasha's arm and steered her along, trying to catch up with Padreic. He ducked his head a little as he spoke and wished he wouldn't feel guilty if he swatted her upside the head. "Look, I don't care  _what_  my father was. He could be the lost king of Corellia for all I care. He's not here and Uncle Gavin is, so maybe that's who you should worry about."

He got such an angry look in return that he almost let go of her arm. "I  _am_  worried about Dad!"

"Then why are you thinking about my father so much?"

"'Cause maybe I'm worried about you too!"

His irritation vanished, replaced by gnawing guilt – but before he could apologize, Padreic stopped short and gestured. Ben changed his attempted apology into a quick tug around a corner, the odd-jobs-man close on his heels. All three of them waited, pressed against a wall, until an Imp patrol marched down the street in dusty white armor. Only when their clomping, rhythmic footsteps had been completely swallowed up by the buzz of the crowd did Padreic let them continue on their way.

Ben didn't feel much like talking after that. Judging by Sasha's expression, she didn't either.

By the time they reached the docking bay – a squat, ugly little building with  _Republica Galactic_  scrawled on it in nearly-faded letters – Ben was sure his heart was trying to pound its way straight through his ribs. There hadn't been any other Imp patrols, but it seemed like the closer Padreic got him and Sasha to the promise of off world transport and safety, the less secure he actually felt. Worse, the prickling sensation from Hermit's Hut was back, along with the strange chill he had first felt the night the Imps had attacked Draco's Well. He kept glancing over his shoulder, expecting at any moment to see entire squadrons of stormtroopers converging from all directions. In fact, he was so preoccupied with this that when Padreic stopped, he almost ran into him.

"Easy there," the odd-jobs-man said calmly. He had stopped in front of one of the docking bay's unlabeled, nondescript entrances, and had rested both hands on the top of his cane. "The ship is right through this door. Captain Solo will take care of you from here."

"You're not gonna see us into the docking bay?" Sasha asked. "It could be a trap or something."

Padreic smiled, but this time it wasn't frightening at all. Instead it was almost paternal. "We each walk our own path," he said mildly – and to Ben's astonishment, he reached over and gently rested a hand on Sasha's shoulder. "Take good care of your cousin. He'll need you."

She drew herself up, squaring her shoulders and resting her hand awkwardly on her holster. "I will."

"Thank you." Padreic stepped back and inclined his head slightly, almost like he had stepped out of one of Sasha's fancier holos – a faded leftover of the Imperial Court instead of a glorified scrap dealer. "Don't look back."

Ben flashed a quick, worried smile instead of trying to puzzle out what the old man meant. He grabbed Sasha's hand and tugged her along with him, and together they pushed the heavy doors open and slipped into a hot, narrow corridor. When he glanced over his shoulder – because he had to look back, just in case – the odd-jobs-man had already disappeared into the crowd.


	5. Chapter 5

_"A true leader cannot command unquestioning loyalty. He must earn it through his good judgment, his integrity, and above all his faith in his soldiers."_  
\- Jon-Win Grale,  _A New Translation of the Hykari Vry Sagas,_  B'kath University Publishers, Ltd.

 _"The ability to love another person more than yourself is the quickest path to the Dark Side. It is also the surest means of escaping it. Such is the nature of the Force."_  
\- "Teachings of Leia Organa" (Banned: Imperial Board of Culture)

* * *

 

In his younger days, Darth Rage might have paced in front of his office viewports, as if sheer restless energy could coax answers from the planet he'd once called home. Even now, after hard-earned experience had more or less taught him patience, the urge to  _do something_  was difficult to suppress. He wanted to be on Tatooine with the search teams or doing flyovers with the T.I.E. pilots - in other words, he wanted to be anywhere but here.

He didn't miss the Rebellion's lies and delusions, but its loose chain of command still appealed to him. Dangerously naive though Commander Skywalker might have been, he had been able to get away with things that Lord Rage, the Emperor's right hand, could never dream of.

Rage forced himself to stop pacing and carefully turned his attention to the matter at hand. The stolen message was still out there somewhere, in the hands of enigmatic and apparently resourceful children. Despite his assistant's best efforts, the serious boy and waving girl still had no names to go with their faces - along with no school reports, credit chits, criminal records, personal correspondence, census registrations, identification numbers, or hints at their motivations or personalities. As far as the galaxy was concerned, they didn't exist.

The Force said otherwise.

That was the problem, of course. It was almost impossible to see the future in the Force - it came in bits and pieces, more impressions than concrete facts, and had the unfortunate habit of being a self-fulfilling prophecy anyway - but when he tried to find clues now, all he found was a swirling current of confusing images and sounds, from names he should have forgotten to faces he had never seen before. It was as if he had been put in a cockpit and launched into battle without learning how to fly.

At the center of the chaos, utterly still, was the girl and especially the boy.

It wasn't like anything Rage had ever seen before. Something important was going to happen to them or perhaps because of them, something that would impact him directly.

Damned if he knew what that something was.

He fought down the very undignified urge to punch the bulkhead in frustration.

Rage sighed and rested both hands on the back of his chair. He had no particular desire to be interrupted, but after more than a decade on his staff, his assistant knew better than to bother him for trivial matters. The fact that she was standing in front of his desk, hands clasped behind her back and shoulders squared, meant that she had found something both sensitive and extremely important. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

She stood up straighter, if that was even possible. "My lord, Intel has completed its preliminary checks on Gavin Darklighter. Per your orders, I reviewed the information personally and placed it under Gold-Four clearance."

"That high?" When she nodded stiffly – the closest she would ever come to being offended in his presence – he waved for her to continue. "Don't look at me like that. You know I trust your judgment. Go on. What did they find?"

"That Darklighter has something of a record, my lord. Nine Grade Three smuggling charges in the Mid Rim, all of them between twenty and seventeen years old, with a handful of low-level conspiracy charges thrown in for good measure."

Somehow Rage wasn't even surprised. "He's a Rebel." He didn't bother to make it a question.

"It appears that way." There was the briefest of pauses, which was practically lip-chewing hesitation coming from her. "The conspiracy charges were mostly circumstantial. He's still flagged as an accomplice in most of the Mid Rim."

Rage waited, but for once his assistant wasn't at all forthcoming. When no prompt answer appeared, he allowed a trace of irritation to creep into his voice. "I don't have time for guessing games.  _Whose_ accomplice?"

She focused on a point over his shoulder and spoke flatly, like an officer about to face a firing squad for doing the right thing. "Corran Horn's, my lord. Leia Organa's apprentice."

And suddenly the strange, twisting currents in the Force made sense. Of course this all came back to Leia somehow. Of  _course_. "The fugitives have ties to Organa?"

"Remotely, but – " She stopped herself. By now, she undoubtedly knew better than to tread into the tangle of emotions that accompanied any mention of Leia. She hastily amended her answer to, "Yes, my lord."

Rage scowled down at the datapad. When the picture of the boy and girl said nothing, he balled his hands into fists and turned back to the viewports, his mind racing. Leia had died many years ago, probably before the girl was even born – but her apprentice had lasted a little longer. Long enough to pass on rudimentary training to another, perhaps. More than long enough to hide future Jedi with an old Rebel acquaintance.

At least one of the fugitives was Force-sensitive. Rage was sure of it now. He could feel it.

The girl he could still save. She was young – probably too young to have received any training from Horn. He would need an apprentice soon anyway, and she might still be open-minded enough to see the Rebellion for what it really was. There was hope for her, if she proved to be the Force-sensitive one.

If it was the boy...

Rage sighed. The boy was old enough to have been trained as a Jedi since birth _._ If Leia's son was anything to go by, he was beyond all hope.

There was no helping it, then. If the Force-sensitive one was the boy, he would have to die.

Something crinkled and splintered behind him. Rage felt alarm and fear rush from his assistant, although when he turned around, she simply stared at him. Without saying a word, she dropped her gaze to look pointedly at something on his desk.

The datapad had been totally destroyed, crushed in a useless mess of sparking circuitry and shattered casing. What little was left was small enough to fit inside his fist.

With a supreme effort, he relaxed his grip on the Force. There would be more productive uses for his anger later. "You have something to add, Lieutenant?"

She regarded him with something that might have been concern, had it been directed at anyone else. "You mentioned trusting my judgment, my lord."

"Of course I do."

"Is it too much to hope that I might do the same?"

After all this time, sometimes he was still taken aback by her sheer audacity. "Don't overstep your bounds."

"My apologies, my lord."

"If you were anyone else, you would be dead."

"I am aware of that, my lord. I was merely reminding you of your first order to me. Forgive me." She ducked her head in the quick, perfunctory way he had learned was less of an apology than a tactical retreat. Some days Rage was sure that she approached him the same way she approached a military exercise - like a puzzle to be solved or a scenario to be worked out through any means necessary.

That particular personality quirk had once saved countless lives. Someday it was going to kill her. It was one of the many things they had agreed on over the years.

He accepted her apology, such as it was, with a slight, curt nod. "Bring me the latest intelligence on Anakin Organa's whereabouts. Immediately."

If she was thrown by this sudden change in topic, she gave no sign. "You believe he's here?"

Rage didn't have an answer he could put into words. He knew only that if Leia's wayward son didn't already know about the fugitives, he would very soon. If capturing them forced the so-called last of the Jedi out of hiding, so much the better.

All he said was, "I gave you an order, Lieutenant."

"Yes, my lord. I'll inform Intel immediately." She bowed stiffly at the waist and turned on one heel to leave.

"Lieutenant Archimedes."

One of these days he was going to figure out how anyone could slip into a perfectly respectable parade stance so quickly. "My lord?"

"Inform Captain Kraiz that I have new coordinates for him."

To her credit, she didn't ask why he wanted the  _Retaliator_  to deviate from its search pattern. "You have new information?"

Rage glanced back at the viewports – at the planet he had been happy to leave behind, all those years ago – and let his anger and the Force guide his thoughts. He permitted himself a small, grim smile.

"Something like that," he said.

* * *

The docking bay's narrow corridor was filthy and poorly lit. If not for the muted sounds of Mos Espa's pedestrians outside, it would have been utterly silent. A decayed smell hung so thick in the air that in a less urgent situation, Ben might have stopped to pull his collar over his nose.

But there was no time for that – and once he saw the figure standing at the other end of the corridor, any questions about when the place had last been cleaned flew right out of his head. Instead he dropped his hand to hover awkwardly over his blaster pistol. He heard Sasha shifting behind him and quickly stepped in front of her, so that she was as protected as possible.

The girl directly in front of them was maybe his age, if not a little younger. Her long hair and large eyes were both very dark, while her tunic and trousers looked as if they had been designed by someone with a particular fondness for shiny black leather and no concept of modesty. She barely came up to his nose, easily making her the shortest human he had ever seen.

He didn't really notice any of these things, because she was also very calmly pointing a blaster pistol at his face.

"Who the frag are  _you?_ " she said.

Ben desperately tried to form words, but the only thing that seemed to matter was the barrel pointed right between his eyes. "I – "

The girl's glance shifted off to his left, although her blaster didn't. Almost before he could blink, a second pistol appeared in her other hand, aimed right at where he assumed Sasha was. "Hands away from the blaster, kid."

"Sasha, don't." He forced himself not to look back at his cousin, keeping his gaze locked on the girl. "My name's Ben. We're just here to get on a ship."

The girl glanced at his belt for a moment, where his toolkit and Padreic's weapons hung together. Her hands tightened on her blasters – but instead of shooting, she muttered something about spacing her captain and reholstered both pistols, one on each thigh. "You're our passengers?"

"Maybe?" Ben felt a little like he was trying to navigate Mos Espa without a map. "You don't look like Captain Solo."

"'Cause I'm not, you kriffing moron." She folded her arms across her chest, apparently perfectly at ease now. "I'm Melody. I'm Solo's gunner."

"So why'd you try to shoot us?" Sasha snapped. In other circumstances Ben might have marveled at her ability to recover from being threatened so quickly.

Melody rolled her eyes. "If I'd been trying, you'd be dead." She jerked her head somewhere behind her, where the corridor ended abruptly with a large door. "You wanna get off this rock or what?" Without waiting for a reply, she started back toward what Ben could only assume was the docking bay. She didn't seem particularly interested in whether or not either Darklighter was following her.

Both cousins did, but Ben wasn't happy about it. He didn't exactly distrust Melody – if he worked with a wanted man like Captain Solo, he'd be jittery too – but something about her made him uneasy. Maybe it was the fact that she seemed to be a little too familiar with her weapons, as if she'd used them so often that she didn't even think about them anymore.

 _At least she's not Padreic,_  the ever-present rational part of his mind supplied. It was right, of course. Cranky and profane though she apparently was, Melody probably wasn't going to spring cryptic warnings on him. He doubted she would bother with him long enough to turn his life and expectations totally upside-down.

After the past couple days, that was a bizarrely comforting thought.

The docking bay proper was no better than the corridor. The ship in it was, if anything, much worse. Ben assumed it had probably been some sort of cargo tug at some point, but it had been retrofitted and repaired and tinkered with so many times that it didn't look spaceworthy at all. He would have worried about crashing in it if he wasn't so sure that it wouldn't be able to get off the ground in the first place.

"It looks like Jawas put it together," Sasha said. After a cursory examination, she amended that to, " _Blind_  Jawas."

Ben wanted to correct her – Jawas actually made their sandcrawlers  _go_ , after all – but then something he had mistaken for a warped sensor array shifted precariously and dropped to the ground with a loud  _clank_. It was a landing ramp. At least he hoped it was a landing ramp. Otherwise parts of the ship were falling off, which was a possibility he didn't even want to consider.

That was the problem with being a mechanic, he decided. He hadn't even seen all of the ship yet, but he'd already come up with six ways it could kill him. After a moment's thought, he hastily added "squished by falling equipment" to the top of his growing list.

A tall young man with finger-combed hair hurried down the landing ramp, not even sparing Ben and Sasha a cursory glance as he waved towards Melody. "Why the hell isn't your comlink on?"

"So the Imps can't eavesdrop," Melody snapped back. "Who spiked your caf anyway? Calm down!"

The man shook his head. "The Imp cruiser just changed course. It's headed for a holding pattern over Mos Espa – point one-eight if we're lucky."

Ben had no idea what any of this meant, but Melody just swore viciously and shoved him right in the small of his back. "Hal, if this is your fault – "

"It's not," the man said, but before Ben could ask what they were talking about, Melody pushed him through the hatch and yanked Sasha after them both. The man – Hal, Ben supposed – brought up the rear, slamming his palm against some sort of jury-rigged control panel. "Get them settled. We're taking off."

"Settled  _where?_ " Melody muttered, but Hal had already disappeared down one of the ship's twisting corridors. After a moment, she scrubbed her face with one hand. "Fraggit."

"Don't you have a place for passengers?" Ben asked. He'd spotted the loose wires and open maintenance hatches scattered all over this particular corridor, prompting him to add "spontaneous decompression" and "big hot fire" to his list.

Melody scowled at him. "Does this look like a ferry?"

"It looks like a piece of scrap," Sasha said in what she probably thought was a whisper.

"Cram it or I'll tie you to the landing gear." Melody sighed and seemed to get a grip on herself. "Just follow me to the cockpit. Touch anything and I'll rip your arms off."

Ben wondered why she was looking right at him. After all, Sasha was the one who hadn't been able to keep her comments to herself. "We won't. Promise."

She didn't seem inclined to dignify that with an answer. Instead she just waved for them to follow her. At the same time, the deck began to rumble alarmingly. Something towards the back of the ship made a noise like a squashed bantha, and there was a disorienting moment of horrible weightlessness before gravity reasserted itself.

"What  _was_  that?" Sasha asked. She was probably trying to sound annoyed, but all that came out was a rather frightened squeak.

Melody grinned, or at least showed all her teeth. "We just took off. The grav systems are a little fragged. Nothing to worry about."

Ben added "flattened like a sunbug" to his mental list and decided right then and there that he would never voluntarily set foot on a ship ever again. If there was anything positive to be gained from this whole mess, it was the knowledge that he  _really_  didn't like flying.

He had to count his blessings somewhere, he supposed.

The ship's tiny, crowded cockpit looked as if it had been designed for one very small pilot, but somehow two seats and a host of extra equipment had been crammed in as well, making it almost impossible to maneuver. Despite this, Melody squeezed in with practiced ease and gestured impatiently for them to follow. "Where'd the Imps go?"

"Right over us," Hal said grimly. He was settled in what was probably the copilot's seat and seemed more interested in the viewport than in his passengers. Outside the ship, the sky was rapidly fading from blue to purple to star-sprinkled black – and maybe if Ben hadn't been so worried, he would have thought it was a beautiful sight. As the moment, all it did was make him feel queasy.

Melody slipped around what looked like a half-assembled sensor array and positioned herself behind Hal's chair. Her hands gripped his headrest so tightly that her knuckles turned white. "Rage, right?"

For a second Hal didn't say anything. "We can jump once we're clear of the gravity well, but..." He trailed off, shaking his head. When Melody balled one hand into a fist and punched the back of his chair, he didn't even seem to notice.

Then the man in the pilot's seat shifted long enough to run his hands over a set of nondescript controls, and Ben realized that he had almost forgotten there was another person in the cockpit. He was grizzled and graying and he hadn't shaved in a long time – and it was as if everyone else had stopped whatever they were doing to look at him.

"We're making a blind jump," he said, glancing from one face to the next as if this meant something significant. From the way Hal's jaw set and Melody muttered something obscene, it probably did. "Don't bother with the fancy stuff. Just clear the big hazards and go."

Hal looked as if he wanted to argue, but all he did was look up at Melody. "You ready?" he asked softly. "Just in case?"

Her voice was so quiet that Ben was sure she hadn't planned on anyone else overhearing. "Always will be."

"Right." Hal turned back to the viewports and his consoles. "I've got a target, Han. Just keep us out of the tractor beam for a couple minutes. That's all I need."

"That's all you'll get," Captain Solo muttered. "We've got company."

Almost before the words left his mouth, a sharp-edged wide _something_ appeared at the edge of the viewport. It grew longer and wider with each passing moment, turning in a slow, graceful arc until its entire length came into view. It was enormous – bigger than the largest ship Ben had ever imagined – and made of protrusions and stark lines and  _presence_. He could only imagine how pathetically small Captain Solo's little ship looked beside it.

How could anyone, even a famous Rebel, fight something big enough to blot out the suns?

"They're not shooting yet." Sasha's voice thrummed with poorly-hidden panic and seemed to come from very far away. "They've got a Star Destroyer! Why aren't they  _shooting?_ "

"Because they want you two alive." Melody was still directly behind Hal's chair, so that she was a dark shape silhouetted against the Imp ship. "They're trying to blockade us and herd us into tractor range. That's why we've gotta make the blind jump first."

Ben had to ask. "What's a blind jump?"

"Random coordinates." She looked over her shoulder long enough to smile again, bright and dangerous like a holovid monster. "We get lucky, we'll land in the middle of a star."

 _Oh_. "And if we aren't lucky?"

This time all she did was rest her hand on one of her blasters. "Then the Imps grab us first."

For a moment he could only stare at her, because they were off the planet and they should have been  _safe_  – and then Padreic's warning came rushing back to him, crushing down on him like a weight. "They can't catch us!"

"They won't," Captain Solo said, quiet and grim. "Not without a fight. I'll give us cover fire. Just sit tight."

Ben shivered and pressed his back against the bulkhead, hugging himself against a sudden chill. The cockpit was silent except for the beep-whirring machinery and the not-quite-sounds of Captain Solo and Hal wrestling with the controls. That was what scared him more than anything – the lack of noise, where on Tatooine there would have been wind and sand in his face. The giant cruiser outside the viewports ducked and lurched and sometimes lit up with flashes that had to be blaster fire. That was the only sign Ben had that they were all fighting for their lives.

He shut his eyes against the sight. The Imp ship scared him in a way that he didn't understand. It was dark and cold and grasping, as if there was an icy claw was trying to wrap itself around his heart.

" _You will draw the Emperor's attention,"_  Padreic's voice whispered in his head. " _He will destroy you."_

For the first time, Ben wondered if the odd-jobs-man hadn't been warning him at all – if he had just been stating a simple, unavoidable fact.

_I don't want to die!_

Sasha caught his hand and tugged on it. When he opened his eyes, he saw her pointing at a red light flashing on Hal's console. "What's that mean?"

"That we're clear of the grav well!" Melody crowed. Her voice echoed in the cockpit, but she was so busy clapping Hal's shoulder that she didn't seem to notice.

"Don't start celebrating yet," Captain Solo muttered, but the strange, deathly silence seemed to have left the cockpit. "Here goes nothing."

He yanked on a lever of some kind. The ship shuddered and lurched and bobbed alarmingly. Through the viewports, Ben could see the Star Destroyer elongate, stretching from a wedge to a line as the stars behind it began to stream and twist. There was a sound of screeching metal, as if something was trying to tear the cockpit in half, and then everything outside the ship vanished in a kaleidoscope of colors and light.

Captain Solo glanced around the cockpit, almost like he wanted to reassure himself that everyone was still in one piece. Then he eased the lever back into position.

They didn't reappear inside a star, or stuck halfway through an asteroid, or any of the hundred other things Ben had imagined could possibly go wrong. Instead the only thing he saw through the viewport was the distant curve of a planet, complete with more star-speckled black and – more importantly – no Imps whatsoever. The Star Destroyer was gone, and the horrible crushing cold seemed to have vanished with it.

"Holy kriffing  _hell_ ," Melody whispered. "We did it!"

"Doesn't matter if we landed in Imp space," Sasha said. "Where are we?"

Hal grinned at her. "The Ludlii mining system. Not an Imp in sight. We're clear." He looked like he wanted to add something else, but then Melody gave a strangled, relieved laugh and wrapped her arms around him. After a moment, he abandoned his controls long enough to rest his hands over hers, murmuring something that Ben couldn't quite catch.

He wondered what they were so happy about – but then he caught sight of Captain Solo, who was watching the whole exchange with bleak eyes and a set jaw, and realized that he didn't want to know.

"Are we really safe?" he asked.

Captain Solo frowned at him. "For now." He shook his head slightly, as if he wasn't quite sure what to do with the whole situation, much less with passengers. "There's a spaceport here. We're gonna have to set down for repairs."

He could only imagine what the engines looked like. "I can help. A little, I mean. I'm a – "

"You fix things. I heard." The captain's expression softened. "Here," he said, climbing out of his chair. "I'll show you where the living quarters are. Hal can land the ship."

Ben just nodded. "Sasha?"

His cousin shook her head. "I wanna see how the controls work. Just in case."

He almost dragged her along anyway – the very last thing he wanted was to be alone with Captain Solo – but of course she was right. One of them ought to know how the controls worked, and she had always been the better pilot. "Don't break anything," he said instead, and hastily followed Captain Solo out of the cockpit before she decided to throw something at him.

* * *

One of Han's better-known qualities was his ability to adapt to situations as the need arose. Admittedly he didn't always adapt  _well_ , as Leia and Chewie had often pointed out, but he was good at making do. He could think on his feet. That, more than anything else, was what had kept him alive.

And he had no idea what to do with Ben Darklighter.

In some ways the kid was exactly what he had expected – sheltered, naïve, exactly like another farmboy he'd run into a long time ago – but after that the similarities ended. Ben was  _quiet_. He didn't seem confrontational, nor did he strike Han as terribly eager to be offworld in the first place. Instead of trying to explore the ship, he trudged along a few feet behind, examining the bulkheads and maintenance hatches with an air of anxious disapproval.

"What's its name?" he asked suddenly.

Han blinked at him. "What?"

"The ship," Ben said. "Unless you don't want to tell me. I guess it could be a secret or something." He was all apologies and worry, his hands jammed in his pockets and his gaze slipping away from Han's.

_You've got no idea what this is about, do you, kid?_

He pushed the bleak thought away. "This is the  _Icarus_. Best gunrunner in the Outer Rim."

"It's very nice," Ben said, although his expression suggested that he thought nothing of the sort. He had the most open face Han had ever seen – and why wouldn't he, growing up on a backwater like Tatooine? That had been the  _point_ , hadn't it?

He stopped and leaned against the bulkhead, half-watching the boy awkwardly stand in the middle of the corridor. "Why'd that cruiser scare you?"

To his credit, Ben just looked at him as if he'd sprouted horns. "Because I don't want the Imps to catch me," he said, as if he were stating a self-evident fact.

Maybe if he hadn't spent so much time around Force-users, Han would have left it at that. But he'd had years to watch Leia's expression cloud over when she felt something wrong with the galaxy, and then more years of the blood draining from Hal's face every time they had a near miss with Rage. Everyone felt the Dark Side differently, Leia had told him once, but it was impossible to miss – like someone had sucked all the air or light out of a room.

"Who gave you the lightsaber?"

Ben's hand dropped to his belt, as if he had only just remembered what he was carrying. His eyes went very wide. "I – I just found it! It's not mine! Padreic said – "

 _Of course he did_. If he hadn't known the cruiser was still lying in wait, Han would have turned the ship around and flown back to Tatooine, just for the pleasure of breaking the old man's jaw. "What did he say?"

The boy's mouth twisted, like he was trying to smile. "It's nothing. It's pretty stupid, really – "

" _Ben_."

He jerked his hand away from the lightsaber and folded his arms at his waist, resting them against his palms. "He said the Emperor would destroy me." His head jerked from side to side and his voice trembled – from fear or anger or simple exhaustion, Han couldn't tell. "I'm not a Jedi. I'm  _not_. I  _can't_  be."

This must have been what the boy's namesake had felt like, making facts out of half-truths and well-chosen words. Han was almost used to it by now.

"I know, kid." He hated himself as soon as the words left his mouth. "I know."


	6. Chapter 6

_"Wild rumors and known anomalies aside, it is highly unlikely that any Jedi Knights miraculously survived the initial Purges. The persistant stories of a vast Jedi army can be attributed to wishful thinking and fanciful imaginations - or, at best, to Organa's ill-fated attempt at reviving their order."_  
\- Immalene Mir,  _Myths and Cults of the Old Republic,_  Circes-Beston House, Inc.

 _"The attack on the Whistler's Gate was the proverbial line in the sand. Once that line was crossed, there was no going back. The Rebellion doomed itself."_  
\- Du Kindathar'ik,  _The Ballad of the Whistler's Gate_  (Banned: Imperial Board of Culture)

* * *

 

The bridge of the  _Retaliator_  was eerily silent. Its crew hurried from one station to another, attempting to track a ship that shouldn't have eluded them in the first place, but not one of them issued a single order. They didn't need to – a testament to their considerable talents as much as to their fear of Darth Rage. They were among the best officers in the Imperial Navy, and their first priority was simply to find out what had gone so spectacularly wrong.

None of them had made a mistake. Rage was sure of that. Leaving aside the fact that his crew was the best in the Imperial Navy, he had spent enough time as a Rebel to recognize a dangerous escape attempt when he saw it. The freighter's stunt should have blown out its own engines or sent it flying blindly into the  _Retaliator_ 's waiting tractor beams. The fact that it hadn't was a testament to its pilot's skill.

Unless, of course, some other factor was at work.

Rage leaned on one of the bridge's narrow railings and scowled out the viewports, temporarily oblivious to his ship and crew. Even though Lieutenant Archimedes hadn't finished compiling her intelligence reports, he knew that the Darklighter fugitives and the missing message had been aboard the freighter. He doubted either of them had flown it, however, which meant that someone else was helping them.

But who would go up against his personal warship just to save two children? And were they trying to protect the message, or – as Rage was beginning to suspect – were they more interested in the fugitives themselves?

"My lord?" Captain Kraiz sounded more than a little nervous, but Rage had promoted the man for his competence, not for displays of false bravado. "We've finished calculating the freighter's trajectory and energy output. They can't have gone far."

"I'm aware of that," Rage murmured, his gaze never leaving the viewports. "Just tell me where they are, Captain."

"We've narrowed our search to ten systems." Captain Kraiz cleared his throat. "This all assumes they reached their destination, my lord. If they did perform a blind jump, it's entirely possible that - "

"They're alive." Rage straightened and clasped his hands behind his back. "Thank you, Captain. We'll hold position for now."

"My lord?"

In less pressing circumstances, he would have smiled at such carefully polite skepticism. "Access the Holonet grids in the targeted systems," he continued, "and place a bounty on the freighter and its passengers. A half-million credits should do it."

"We won't be pursuing them?"

"There are desperate people in this part of the galaxy," Rage said softly. He shook his head and smiled, hardly noticing when Kraiz took a quick step back. "No, Captain, we won't be pursuing them. We won't have to."

* * *

"So. That's your cousin, huh?"

Sasha didn't bother to look at Hal Horn, preferring to glare at the approaching planet far below her. It was small and muddy-brown, its surface crisscrossed with lines and gouges. "What about him?"

"Is he the one the Imps are after?"

Although it was phrased as a question, she had the distinct impression it was nothing of the kind. "We found a coded message and the Imps think we took it on purpose."

Hal's reflection was visible in the viewports. She glanced at it just in time to see him roll his eyes. "Did that message of yours come with a lightsaber?"

She  _knew_  it had been a bad idea to bring that thing with them. "We didn't build it or anything, if that's what you mean. We found it, too." When Hal said nothing, she finally tilted her head long enough to frown at him, even though he had Melody in the cockpit to back him up. "Ben didn't do anything wrong, okay? He's nothing special."

"Who said he was anything special?"

"Someone back home. You." And her parents, now that she thought about it. Until that moment, she hadn't realized how strange they had been with Ben, insisting that he never leave Draco's Well when he hadn't ever wanted to in the first place.

Sasha had only seen one holo of Ben with his mother - the only one her family had ever owned, as far as she knew. It had sat on her parents' wardrobe for as long as she could remember, and even when she was little, she had been struck by how much her cousin didn't look like a Darklighter at all. While Aunt Rasca had been sharp-featured and square-jawed, Ben had the sort of striking coloring and round face that had always made her wonder what his father must have looked like. There was no way to be certain, of course. As her parents had always been quick to point out, neither one of them had ever set eyes on the man, and Aunt Rasca apparently hadn't bothered to describe him before she died.

So why all the precautions? Why go to such great lengths to keep Ben in Draco's Well? Why had Padreic given such dire warnings about the Imps – about the  _Emperor_ , as if someone as quiet as Ben could possibly attract that kind of attention?

Maybe she had been right after all. Maybe Ben's father had been something more than a smuggler - and her parents and Padreic and Aunt Rasca had known all along.

Sometimes people in the Dune Sea settlements had called her cousin a space bastard - and maybe it never bothered him, but it had always made Sasha grit her teeth and ball her hands into fists and come home with bruised knuckles and a black eye. Ben was her  _family_. It didn't make a difference who was trying to hurt him, be they stuck-up Farstrider kids or smugglers like Hal or Darth Rage himself. She had been fiercely protective of him - her brother in every way that mattered - for as long as she could remember. She wasn't about to stop now.

That was probably what made her look at Hal the way she did, dangerous and no-nonsense like her mom had been. "If you do anything to Ben, I'll kill you."

Hal smirked, although he didn't seem to be terribly friendly about it. "You and what army?" When she just muttered something that would've made her mom scrub out her mouth with disinfectant, he sighed and jabbed a finger at the empty pilot's seat. "Either sit down and shut up or get out of the cockpit. I've got a ship to land."

Glaring for all she was worth, Sasha plopped down in the pilot's seat and stared out the viewport. "You're sure there's no Imps here, right?"

"We'll be fine if we're careful. Han knows what he's doing."

Melody snorted - apparently her opinion of Captain Solo wasn't nearly as high as Hal's - but she nodded anyway. "I'm from one of the Rim mining worlds. Trust me, they don't like Imps."

Sasha risked a glance back at her. "What if I don't?"

"What, trust me?" She grinned big and wide, with a nasty edge that made Sasha wish she had the family carbine in easy reach. "I'd just as soon tie you up with a fragging  _bow_  and hand you over myself, don't get me wrong." Then the grin vanished, replaced by a cold, furious look that went straight out the viewport and through the planet, out into the depths of space. "But I'm not gonna do that," she said softly. "None of us will."

This was probably one of those moments when it was wiser to keep her mouth shut, but Sasha couldn't help herself. "Why not?"

To her surprise, Hal was the one who answered - and she wished he hadn't, because something about his expression was  _old_ , like he'd seen a hundred different Draco's Wells burning and lost a hundred different mothers all at once.

"Because no one deserves to be handed over to Rage," he said, his voice quiet and vicious. " _No one_. Not even you."

* * *

There were a handful of people Gavin Darklighter trusted with his life. Padreic definitely wasn't one of them.

This left him with a bit of a problem, because at that moment the odd-jobs-man was standing in the doorway to Gavin's detention cell, leaning on his cane and looking like a self-satisfied lunatic. An unconscious stormtrooper was just visible behind him, slumped against a wall. If Gavin knew Padreic at all - and, unfortunately, he did - half the garrison was probably in much the same state.

"You've never heard of subtlety, have you." He didn't bother to make this remotely resemble a question. Padreic wouldn't know subtlety if it hijacked a sandcrawler and ran him over.

Sure enough, Padreic just shrugged one shoulder, still far too pleased with himself. "My way gets the job done."

"What way? Mass homicide?"

The odd-jobs-man's smug smile vanished, taking any levity with it. "I don't kill, Darklighter."

Gavin refused to dignify that with an answer. Instead he climbed unsteadily to his feet. While he was still mobile, the Imps had been none too gentle about taking him into custody. "The cameras?"

"What do you think?"

The garrison would probably be picking bits and pieces of surveillance equipment out of the walls for weeks. "Ben and Sasha?"

"Safer than you are."

"That's not reassuring."

"Good." Padreic glanced over his shoulder. "I'd suggest we leave while we have the chance. Unless you would rather meet Rage's interrogators."

Gavin did his best to hide a shudder. "I'll pass," he said, and hurried around the odd-jobs-man to collect the unconscious stormtrooper's blaster rifle. Once he'd flicked the safety off, he started down the corridor. "Now where?"

"Not off world. Most of the docking bays are sealed, and I imagine they'll finish the rest once word of this little adventure gets out. That's standard procedure." Padreic fell into step, hobbling along faster than Gavin could have managed with that cane. "They seem to be leaving Liza's house alone, so we'll stop there first. After that, we'll work out the best way to get in contact with Sasha."

He nodded once, scanning two side corridors for stray stormtroopers. So far he hadn't found any - not conscious ones, anyway. Padreic was still frighteningly thorough when he chose to be. "And Olivea?"

Padreic said nothing.

That was all the answer he needed, of course - he had seen her go down during the struggle, her face seared half-off by a blaster bolt - but there was a grim finality in the old man's silence that would have made him bow his head, if only he'd had the time. Sasha and Ben hadn't been captured yet, which was a miracle ten times over. That was all Olivea would have cared about. She certainly wouldn't have wanted him grieving over her, not when the rest of their family was still out there somewhere.

They stepped out of the garrison just as two Imps rounded the nearby corner, obviously on the way back from patrol. Gavin swore softly and brought his stolen blaster up - but before he could so much as take aim, Padreic gripped his cane like an improvised lightsaber and spun once, quick and sharp. The motion carried him between the stormtroopers, who each went down with a blow right under the backs of their helmets. Neither of them had had the time do much more than raise their weapons. In all likelihood, they had never seen what hit them.

No, Padreic definitely hadn't lost his touch. Gavin wasn't sure if that worried him or not.

The odd-jobs-man was almost doubled over now. His face had gone very pale and he was leaning on his cane again, supporting himself with one trembling arm. Nonetheless, his expression was completely calm and his voice was more stubborn than exhausted.

"I told you," he said simply. " _I don't kill_."

 _Now._  Now  _you don't,_  Gavin corrected him in the relative privacy of his own head,  _and a lot of good that'll do us if you die proving it._  Muttering to himself, he tucked the blaster rifle under one arm and hurried over, letting the taller man sling his free arm over his shoulders. That in itself wasn't pleasant; Padreic was heavier than he had any right to be. "Please tell me you've got a transport."

"Your landspeeder. In the garrison's garage." The odd-jobs-man sounded pleased with himself again. Figured.

Gavin decided that he didn't want to know how Padreic had gotten his hands on the family landspeeder, much less how he'd tricked the Imps into holding onto it for him. Shaking his head, he began helping Padreic along, wishing that he wasn't stuck relying on him - and that he didn't owe him so much.

But he  _did_  owe him. If Padreic really had managed to get Ben and Sasha off world and away from the Empire's prying eyes, then there wasn't enough money in the galaxy to repay him.

_If Rage had caught them..._

Gavin shook his head. Hell, if Padreic saved the kids from Rage - if he let them live normal, simple lives somewhere far from the Core - he would go one better than repaying the old man.

He'd even begin to forgive him.

 

* * *

As Captain Solo led Ben through the  _Icarus_ , it became obvious just how little of the ship was actually used for carrying cargo - or for much of anything, really. Most of the hatchways and side corridors had been sealed off at some point in the past, possibly by more of Sasha's blind Jawas. Everything else was in a half-finished state of repair, as if neither the infamous Rebel nor his strange crew could be bothered to make their ship truly spaceworthy. None of them cared about it.

 For a moment Ben felt very sorry for the poor freighter. Then he realized he was sympathizing with a flying deathtrap and hastily put that thought out of his head.

Besides the cockpit, the only decent part of the  _Icarus_  was a converted cargo hold, which had been turned into something that remotely resembled a living space. There was a table and mismatched chairs, a few datapads stacked haphazardly in a corner, some floating targets, a little gaming console called  _Amazing Aces!_  that was probably twice Ben's age, and a food prep station that looked as if it hadn't seen disinfectant in decades. An ancient astromech droid was poking at an open power hatch next to the sonic washers, beeping irritably to itself.

Captain Solo ignored the mess and stalked toward the prep station, absently bumping into the droid on his way over. It made an outraged squeak-blat noise and rotated its domed head in his general direction.

If the captain noticed the rebellious and probably vulgar droid, he didn't comment on it. "Sit down, kid."

Ben eyed the chairs warily. They all looked sticky. "Do I have to?"

Captain Solo ran one hand down his face. "Kid…" he began, sounding very put-upon, but then the droid spun around and Ben forgot about polite refusals entirely.

Before he quite knew what was happening, the little astromech droid had taken up a sort of irregular orbit around him, swiveling its dome as if it wanted to keep him in sight at all times. It rocked back and forth as it wheeled around the living quarters at full speed, beeping and whistling in a way that could only be called deliriously happy. He was very grateful it didn't have any arms, or else it probably would have tried to hug him.

It took a few seconds for Captain Solo to find his voice. When he did, he sounded worried and just a little furious. "Artoo!"

The droid - Artoo, Ben assumed - squeaked to a halt and made an extremely rude noise.

"This is our passenger," Captain Solo said, each word slow and deliberate and shaded with something that wasn't quite anger. "This is  _Ben_. Got it?"

Artoo backed away from Ben and tilted forward on its stubby legs, as if it was thinking very hard. After a moment, it gave a soft, mournful sort of whistle and retreated to the open hatch, disappearing into the corridor.

Ben perched himself on the edge of the table, since he wasn't brave enough to try the chairs. "Did I do something wrong?"

"He thought you were someone else," Captain Solo said. "Forget it."

There was more to it than that. Ben could feel it like a heavy presence in the air. "Who?"

"Who what, kid?"

"Who did he think I was?"

There was a very long silence - one broken only by the faint hiss of the air vents and the distant sounds of the Icarus beginning to run through its landing cycle. Captain Solo had turned back to the prep station, fiddling with knobs and buttons, but Ben didn't need to see his face to notice the tense, almost frightened set to his shoulders. Even after the past few days, he nearly apologized for asking.

Nearly, but not quite. He stared down at his hands, and he kept his voice steady and quiet. "Who did he think I was, Captain?"

Captain Solo went still, just for a moment. Then he sighed and walked over, shoving a cup of caf at him. "Artoo used to know - " He cut himself off, then moved on so quickly that Ben almost didn't notice the pause. "He used to know who Rage was."

"You mean Skywalker?"

The only answer was a curt nod.

He wrapped his fingers around the caf cup. It was cold to the touch. "Do we look the same - me and Rage?"

"No," Captain Solo said quickly. "You're nothing alike."

"So why did - "

"Kid. Ben." He leaned against the bulkhead and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "He was here when I helped get Skywalker off that dustball you call home. That's it."

There was a note of warning in his voice that Ben decided he probably couldn't ignore. Instead he sipped the caf - it tasted awful - and tried to push away the nagging feeling that something about this was all wrong. "Why did you help us?"

Captain Solo just frowned at him.

"The Imps want us, right? And - and you used to know Rage, so wouldn't you be in more danger than us if we're caught?" He looked at the deck and the bulkhead and his boots, anywhere but at Captain Solo. "I'm really grateful. I just...we've had lots of help from people we don't know and I don't understand  _why_."

"Padreic?"

Ben nodded. "He's the one who told me about Skywalker and what the Empire would do to me." He clutched the caf cup, as if squeezing it hard enough would make the horrible tightness in his chest go away. "What if someone else gets hurt just because I'm with them? What if  _Sasha_  - "

He couldn't make himself say that particular fear. He just couldn't.

"You can't trust Padreic," Captain Solo said. He sounded tired - as if he had been angry at something for so long that it didn't mean much anymore. "He's got his own plans, and damned if I know what he wants to do with you."

Ben wished he didn't remember the strange, unfocused  _wrongness_  that always seemed to cloak the odd-jobs-man. "Will he turn us over to the Emperor?"

To his astonishment, Captain Solo just shook his head once, as if the very idea were out of the question. "No one hates Palpatine more than that old bastard." He looked as if he were about to add something else, but then he seemed to think better of it. Instead he just clapped Ben on the shoulder once and started towards the corridor. "C'mon. Hal's probably halfway through the landing cycle by now. Let's see how bad the damage is."

Ben knew that was just an attempt to change the subject, but he was so glad for it that he hopped off the table and shoved the caf cup onto the counter before Captain Solo had left the living quarters. All the other lingering questions would just have to wait until the  _Icarus_  was repaired.

Practical concerns had to come first, after all.

* * *

Up close Ludlii was a dusty little world, utterly unremarkable save for the mining pits gouged out of it. Machines twice the size of Draco's Well sprawled beside these holes, utterly dwarfed by them, but not one seemed to be operational. There was no sign of life and no movement other than towering dust storms swirling in the distance. Even though he had never seen a mine before and was only watching through the  _Icarus_ 's viewports, Ben couldn't help feeling a little uneasy.

"We've got clearance to land in one of the old docking bays," Hal said as everyone squeezed back into the cockpit. "It's a little removed from the main settlement, so we should be fine as long as we're careful."

"Any sign of the Imps?" Captain Solo asked.

He shook his head. "I had to punch through some heavy comm traffic, but nothing too strange. Looks like it's all-clear for now."

Ben thought that was the most reassuring piece of news he'd heard since he'd set foot on the freighter, but Captain Solo didn't seem to think so. "Just hurry up and land," he muttered.

Hal deftly maneuvered the  _Icarus_  a few hundred feet over Ludlii's barren landscape, arcing toward a squat, square building some distance from the giant machines. As the freighter approached, a large roof hatch opened up, its jerky movements suggesting that no one had repaired its gears in a long time. Ben folded his arms - somehow all this poorly-kept machinery reminded him how far from home he was - and did his best not to fidget while he waited for the ship to set down safely. "Embarrassing fiery crash" was still high on his list of things that could go spectacularly wrong.

The interior of the cavernous docking bay was in better shape than the rest of Ludlii, but not by much. The best thing that could be said for it was that it was clean and neatly organized, every little-used piece of equipment set exactly in place and polished until it gleamed. It was also almost deserted. Although the bay looked as if it had been designed for a half-dozen ships - and had probably been used by that many and more, judging by some of the grooves on the floor - there were only a few beings moving among the maintenance equipment, and Captain Solo's banged-up little freighter was the only vehicle in sight.

At least it seemed friendly, or at least one of the people working in it did. A girl materialized next to the Icarus almost before the engines had spluttered off, waiting by the landing ramp with her hands clasped behind her back and even bouncing on her toes when it was finally lowered. She was about Ben's age, with a heart-shaped face and little red pigtails and a patched jumpsuit, and if her smile was anything to go by, she was trying to compensate for the rest of her chilly world all by herself.

"Sorry the clearance took so long," she said as Captain Solo started down the ramp, Melody trailing a half-step behind him. Ben reluctantly brought up the rear. He would much rather have stayed safely on the freighter with Hal and Sasha and maybe even Artoo, but someone had to see how much of the engines' casing had survived the blind jump. The girl paused long enough to wave at him before continuing. "There's been Imps all over the comm channels - more than usual, I mean. There's always Imps yelling about something." She wrinkled her nose. "I'm surprised you got through to my papa at all."

"Your  _papa_." In other circumstances, Melody's expression would have been priceless.

The girl nodded. "Dev Iessos. He owns the docking bay. I'm Miri, his oldest." Her bright blue eyes darted from one face to another. "Do you even have a mechanic? No offense, but your engines look like you threw an asteroid at them and I think your coils are about to get up and run away."

Ben took a few steps forward, his anxiety fading. It was hard to stay worried when confronted with someone who not only knew plenty about machines, but also didn't bat an eye at the idea of repairing them. "I don't think they have one," he said. "I guess I'll do for now."

"You're braver than I'd be." Miri flashed another supernova smile. "Well, it'll go faster if there's two of us, so we might as well get to work. I'll grab my tools. Wait right here." She darted off, murmuring something about flash-welders as she went.

There was a long moment of silence before Ben stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged. "She seems nice."

Melody's expression of fascinated, bemused horror hadn't changed at all. "Any nicer and I'll have to kill her," she said.

* * *

"Nice" turned out to be an understatement. Miri Iessos was everywhere at once - hauling tools out of storage, sending some of her father's more sullen employees searching for supplies on the comm channels, fetching stepladders, and even scolding Captain Solo for not keeping the  _Icarus_  in tip-top shape. "After all," she said, half-hidden by a pile of refueling hoses, "it's what keeps you alive out there. You'd be breathing space otherwise."

Captain Solo just looked put-upon. "Where's your father?"

Miri thrust the hoses into Ben's arms and pointed one grease-stained finger toward the far end of the docking bay. "Through the door on the right. You've got to hit it a couple times to open it. It sticks."

He nodded and beat a hasty retreat. Melody hung around for a few moments later, staring at Miri as if she was some kind of terrible new superweapon, before shaking her head once and hurrying after him.

Miri just wrinkled her nose after them. "Aren't they happy little balls of sunshine?" When Ben didn't answer - "no" was the only response he could think of and it struck him as rather inadequate - she scrambled up one of the ladders and held out one hand. "Hand me the resonance measure, will you?"

He set the hoses on the floor long enough to toss it up to her. "I think a couple of the fuel relays are blown."

"Yeah, I guessed." Miri stopped tinkering with the casing long enough to peer at him. "Don't take this wrong, but you don't seem like the type to be planet-hopping on this junkheap."

He had to smile at that. "I don't even like flying."

"Glad  _someone_ 's got their head on right." She hooked an arm around one of the ladder's rungs and leaned back far enough to wave the resonance measure with her free hand, taking in the whole docking bay. "Everyone here just wants to  _go_  somewhere, like finding another world's gonna fix everything."

"It doesn't." He could have told her that even before he found the message. "Do you want to stay here?"

"Damn right." Miri smiled again - she didn't seem to know how to do anything else - but this time there was an edge to it, as if it was just habit and maybe she didn't really mean it. "Ludlii's my  _home_. I'm not gonna leave it just because things are bad right now."

Ben frowned up at her. That didn't sound like the safe haven he'd been hoping for. "Bad?"

"Ludlii's independent - has been for hundreds of years now, since way back during the Republic." Miri's ever-present smile dimmed and she dropped her gaze for a moment. "It's just that the Republic never treated this place half as bad as the Imps do. They don't pay us enough to live on, so we can't keep our equipment running."

She sounded a lot like Uncle Gavin and Aunt Olivea had - only they'd just had a garage to worry about, not a whole planet. "What're you going to do?" he asked.

"We're not gonna revolt or anything," Miri said, "not after what happened to Cree's Cradle, but..." She trailed off, shaking her head. "We'd need a miracle to last much longer."

Ben wished there was something he could say or do to make things better for her. Of all the people he'd met in the last few days, she was the nicest and most level-headed - the one he could actually understand, if just because she so clearly loved Ludlii the same way he loved Draco's Well. "Why are you telling me this?"

She was very quiet for a long moment, and then she slid down the ladder, landing just a few feet from him. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "The Imps put a bounty on this freighter, you know. Just a little while ago. That's why all the comm channels were tied up."

Even though he shouldn't have been surprised - not with the message sitting in his pocket - he felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. He'd heard about all kinds of bounty hunters back on Tatooine, and not one of them cared whether or not their quarry was innocent, just as long as they got paid. "How much?"

"A half-million credits," Miri said.

He couldn't imagine that much money. Draco's Well probably hadn't been worth that much. He tried to tell his heart to stop hammering against his ribs. "Does that mean you're going to turn us in?"

She reached over as if she wanted to squeeze his hand, but then she seemed to think better of it and settled for twisting her fingers in the folds of her jumpsuit. "Just be careful, okay? A half-million credits would be enough to save Ludlii for a while, and I think everybody here knows that."

"That's not making me feel any better."

"Then stick with me," Miri said, and then there was no mistaking the fierce edge to her grin this time. "I won't let anything happen to you. Promise."

* * *

"My lord."

Rage didn't glance at Captain Kraiz to know he had good news. "You have a lead?"

"We've just received a transmission from one of the mining colonies." Kraiz was too professional to smirk, but he seemed to be standing at attention more crisply than usual. "My lord, we have them."


	7. Chapter 7

_"A member of my family unwittingly hastened the destruction of the Republic. I do not intend to make a similar mistake. I would prefer that we maintain at least the pretence of legitimacy. I will continue to oppose the dissolution of the Imperial Senate, and if necessary, I will do so alone."_  
\- Senator Pooja Naberrie, "Transcripts of Imperial Senate Session 914-62A" (classified)

 _"It's hard work, you know. Being the hero."_  
\- Jonos Rell,  _I Am Captain Fantastik: The Extraordinary Man Behind the Groundbreaking Holodrama_ , Imperial Board of Culture

* * *

 

Whatever Hal might have thought about Sasha Darklighter, he couldn't fault her work ethic. He'd been ready to leave the girl in the cockpit, but she'd insisted on following him around and had eventually convinced him to let her do some minor repairs herself - mostly by means of looking over his shoulder and rattling off different ways to fry various vital components.

"I live right by the Dune Sea," she said when he finally caved and pointed her towards a different part of the ship. "As if I don't know what a hydrospanner is."

Hal fought the urge to roll his eyes at her. "Like Ben?"

Sasha just laughed and disappeared down the corridor. Her answer was obvious. When it came to machines,  _no one_  was quite like Ben.

The problem was that Hal was starting to think she was right. Ben was tackling the  _Icarus_ 's engines with the confidence and expertise of a trained engineer - and now that he was in his element, the previously quiet settler boy was suddenly a lot more willing to make demands. Melody had been sent off an errand to buy much-needed supplies, Sasha and Hal and Artoo had all been sent scurrying to different parts of the freighter while Ben rattled off detailed instructions over a comlink, and even Han had been politely ordered to tinker with the power settings a few times. He knew exactly what he was doing, even though he was working with a freighter that dated back to the Clone Wars and had been more or less obsolete long before he was born.

If that wasn't the Force at work, Hal didn't know what was.

He stopped trying to fix the atmospheric seals around the emergency hatch and frowned up at the  _Icarus_ 's unlikely passenger, who was animatedly explaining something to bubbly Miri Iessos. By all appearances Ben was oblivious to the way Miri seemed a half-second away from latching onto him and announcing their wedding date, which suggested that he was ten kinds of oblivious to his surroundings in general. Yes, there was a lightsaber clipped awkwardly to his belt, but Hal had spent his first few years with Leia Organa's would-be Jedi, and something about the way Ben carried himself told Hal that he had absolutely no idea how to wield that kind of weapon. He was undoubtedly using the Force - no one, no matter how brilliant, could possess his instinctive understanding of machines without it - but he didn't seem to be consciously aware of what he was doing. He certainly wasn't the source of that frighteningly powerful presence Hal had felt on Tatooine.

He was starting to suspect that Ben was exactly what he appeared to be - an Outer Rim settler from the middle of nowhere who just happened to have a particularly strong connection to the Force and a very unfortunate name. He had no clue what he'd stumbled into the middle of.

Ben finally seemed to notice Hal's gaze. He blinked down at him curiously for a moment, temporarily distracted from whatever miracle he was pulling off with the engines. "Did you need something?"

 _You're going to get us all killed_.

The thought didn't surprise Hal half as much as it should have.

"Just wanted to know how long before we can take off," he said out loud.

Miri was the one who answered, although not before wrinkling her nose in the general direction of the engines. "A couple hours, maybe?"

"It'll go faster if Melody comes back with the right parts," Ben added, "but this ship is a little old, so I don't know how much luck she'll have."

Hal sighed. That hadn't been the answer he wanted to hear. "Just hurry it up. The sooner we get off this rock, the better."

He needn't have bothered. Ben didn't even wait for him to finish his sentence before he went back to work.

On the bright side, the  _Icarus_  might actually get a competent mechanic out of this mess. Assuming they survived.

Hal stomped back up the ramp and into the freighter, feeling the Force press down on him like it was determined to suffocate him.

Who was he kidding? He knew what this kind of foreboding meant.

They were all going to die.

* * *

"If you do that again," Gavin said through gritted teeth, "I'll kill you."

Padreic grinned at him.

"Slowly.  _Painfully._ "

"You're just jealous that I'm a better driver."

Gavin glanced over his shoulder at the Mos Espa inhabitants who had just finished diving for cover. He doubted any of them would agree, just like he doubted that Padreic gave a damn what they - or Gavin - thought of his piloting.

"Oh, yes," he said flatly. "You're  _fantastic._ "

The "that" in question had been a turn down a narrow alley that had practically tilted the Darklighter family's landspeeder on its side, followed by a twisting passage  _through_  a street bazaar. Gavin was still seeing his fairly eventful life flash before his eyes - and yes, he'd spent a lot of his youth racing through Beggar's Canyon, and maybe he'd wanted to be a fighter pilot before he'd met Olivea, but that was different. That was  _flying_.

This was just insanity.

" _Padreic_."

The odd-jobs-man's smirk wasn't reassuring in the slightest. He took another corner in much the same manner, somehow avoiding a fiery crash with a fuel carrier in the process, and started down the winding streets that would eventually take them out of Mos Espa's old slave quarters and into the most ancient part of the spaceport. Olivea's aunt Liza lived somewhere in that maze, terrorizing her landlord, her neighbors, and random passers-by alike with her own particular brand of paranoia. Aside from necessary visits and the inevitable unpleasant encounter at his wedding, Gavin had tried to avoid her as much as possible.

That wasn't an option anymore. Gavin was an escaped prisoner, and he couldn't endanger his own aunts and uncles and cousins by turning to them for assistance.

Not when Liza already had experience with this sort of thing.

Padreic stopped the landspeeder beside a small, squat shop that sold something unidentifiable in green earthenware jars. A metal staircase bolted precariously to one side of the building led up to the apartment on the top floor, where a sign announced that trespassers would be shot, pushed off the roof, run over with a sandcrawler, and then shot again for good measure.

Gavin paid the warning about as much mind as he always did - which was to say none at all - and banged hard on the door.

A moment later he was nose to barrel with a blaster pistol, but he didn't pay that much mind either. He'd had years to get used to his lone in-law.

"Liza," he said as patiently as he could. "It's  _me_."

There was a disbelieving snort, but the blaster lowered enough to point at his stomach instead of his head. Liza Newsuns resembled her niece enough that it was easy to imagine what Olivea might have looked like in a few decades: blond hair bleached by the suns and slowly going white with age, a weathered and browned face, and confident grip on her weapon. Despite the heat, she was wearing any number of shawls and scarves draped around her bony shoulders. Gavin knew for a fact that there were at least a couple more weapons hidden somewhere in their folds, along with vibroblades and possibly a concussion grenade.

"What're you doing here?" she asked, finally making the blaster disappear somewhere on her person. "No one's shipped you off to Kessel yet?"

"No," Gavin said with what he felt was a superhuman amount of patience, "and I'd like to keep it that way. Can we please come in?"

Liza glanced over his shoulder at Padreic, who smiled and bowed slightly, and then looked back at Gavin with irritation written all over her face. "All right," she muttered, stepping away from the door just enough to let him squeeze inside. "But don't expect me to hide you when the Imps come looking for you."

The interior of Liza's apartment was decorated with more cloth - quilts, spreads, drapes, heavy curtains hung across the one window to block out the sunlight. Every surface was covered with tacky figurines of various Core tourist attractions, mass-produced sculptures of frolicking bantha cubs, and old Clone War propaganda holos of impossibly chubby-cheeked little children and brave-looking soldiers. It was only when one really examined the layout of the single room that other things became apparent. The holoproj on the table, for example, may have been playing a brassy centuries-old Corellian tune, but it was also in good repair and was far more state-of-the-art than anything else Liza owned. The overstuffed furniture had been arranged in such a way as to provide barriers in the event of a siege, and most of the ever-present quilts were made of energy-absorbing fabric. There were no doubt weapons concealed in every nook and cranny. Even the window was just large enough to serve as an escape hatch.

It was, in short, a living space ideally suited to a former member of the Rebellion's intelligence network.

Liza glared at Gavin until he sat and then slammed a tray full of mugs down hard enough to slosh cold bean tea onto the tablecloth. "I could ask you how you got yourself out of Imp custody," she said as she settled herself opposite him, "but I think I can guess."

She was staring right at Padreic as she spoke. The odd-jobs-man simply smiled again and claimed his mug before returning to his corner of the room, where he seemed content to hover like a particularly enigmatic guard.

"I might have helped," he admitted.

"You can't leave well enough alone, more like. As if your  _help_  has ever done us any good." Liza grabbed her own mug and frowned at Gavin. "What happened to my niece?"

Gavin grimaced. He wasn't sure he was ready to talk about this. "She wouldn't let the Imps in our house. Blocked the doorway."

"Stubborn girl," Liza muttered. "What about you? Why are you still here?"

He met her eyes levelly. "Because Olivea got to the doorway first."

"And it never occurred to the pair of you to take the landspeeder and  _go?_ "

Gavin shook his head. "One of the vaporators wasn't working. Ben took the landspeeder to go fix it."

"Hmph." Liza slurped her tea, shoulders hunched. "Always comes back to that boy, doesn't it."

"Olivea wouldn't have wanted him captured."

"She was too attached to him. You, too. You were both  _idiots_ , you know that?" Liza put her cup down and leaned forward like an Imp interrogator, age-spotted hands resting on her knees. "I told you he was just going to bring trouble, but the two of you were  _so_  determined. And your sister! I told you not to tell her anything, but  _no_ , no one listens to an old woman!"

Gavin clenched his hands into fists. Somehow, he managed to keep most of the anger out of his voice. "She deserved to know."

"Then why wouldn't that stupid girl at least change his  _name?_ "

"That stupid girl was my little sister," Gavin said very quietly. "She was Ben's mother, and she decided he was going to keep the name his father gave him. Olivea and I respected her wishes. Please do the same."

Liza stared down at her lap and went uncharacteristically silent. The lines on her face were sharper and more defined than they had been the last time Gavin had seen her and her shoulders were hunched just a little more - from age or grief, he didn't pretend to know.

"What happened to Sasha?" she asked at last.

"She's with Ben," Padreic said mildly.

"And that will keep her safe, will it?"

"The Empire knows her face now. Nothing is going to keep her completely safe."

Liza turned in her seat just enough to look at him. "As if she was ever completely safe before - not with that boy."

Something in Padreic's expression changed ever so slightly. "This isn't Ben's fault."

"No," Liza snapped. "It's  _yours_. All of this is your fault, and nothing you do will ever make up for that."

Padreic went very still. Gavin did too, for different reasons. Like Liza, and like Olivea and Rasca and all the other people privy to this particular secret, he had always been aware of whom the odd-jobs-man used to be, and he had some idea of what he was still capable of. It wasn't that he disagreed with Liza - he just wished she hadn't been quite so blunt.

But Padreic only dropped his gaze to his mug, as if he were looking for the right kind of answer in it. When he raised his head again, there was a faint and completely humorless smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"No," he agreed. "It won't."

"Whatever you're planning to do with that boy," Liza said, voice deceptively soft, "it won't work. You're just going to ruin a lot more lives."

The smile disappeared. Now Padreic just looked lost and much, much older than he ought to, and he gave both Liza and Gavin a look that could almost be described as pleading.

"I need to know I can save  _someone_ ," he said, and then settled into morose, contemplative silence.

* * *

Ben was elbow-deep in assorted circuitry when Miri latched onto his arm and tugged. "Let's go exploring."

He stared at her.

"In the storage bays," she clarified quickly. "Wouldn't this go a little faster if you had the right parts?"

"Um." Ben glanced back down at the engines, which were still unusable even after all the jury-rigging he'd done, and admitted that maybe she had a point. "Doesn't the stuff in the storage bays belong to other people?"

"No one's touched half that stuff since before I was born. I don't think anyone remembers what's back there anymore." Miri sat back on her heels. There was a stubbornness behind her cheerful smile that he was sure he hadn't seen before. She also didn't seem inclined to let go of him.

"Okay," he said reluctantly, "but only for a little bit. If we don't find something right away, we come right back."

"Deal." Miri all but dragged him toward the ladder propped against the engines. "Come  _on._ "

Ben followed at a more sedate pace. She really was right - especially since he doubted Melody was going to find any of the parts he needed - but he didn't like leaving Sasha behind, even for a few minutes.

On the other hand, if he didn't get the engines fixed, he'd have much bigger problems to worry about. He thought of the strange message and of what had happened to Aunt Olivea, and those few horrible moments he'd spent hiding under the family landspeeder while the Imps passed overhead.

If there was a chance Miri's spare parts could help - even if it was  _technically_  stealing - he had to check.

That didn't change the fact that the docking bay suddenly felt freezing cold.

* * *

Melody wasn't finding the supplies Ben had asked her to look for.

Actually, Melody wasn't finding  _anything._

The handful of stores and stalls that weren't completely abandoned were full of empty shelves and a handful of skittish, wary employees and customers. Almost everyone she saw ducked out of sight the second she laid eyes on them. The few who seemed belligerent quickly found somewhere else to be when Melody rested her hand on one of her holsters, but there weren't many people even willing to look her in the eye. The entire colony felt hollow and muted. The only sounds were faint hushed conversations and the wind howling outside, between the rows of identical prefab buildings. The noise that was _supposed_  to be there - the ever-present thrum of the gigantic mining machines that loomed over the horizon like manmade mountains, so deep and constant that it should have made the ground rumble beneath her boots - was completely absent.

For Melody, who had spent her earliest years on a colony much like this one, it was worse than disconcerting. It was like hearing the last painful gasps of a dying world.

She wanted off this planet right the hell now.

The siren started so suddenly that she had one of her blasters half out of its holster before she realized what she was doing. No one else seemed to notice her actions - not when the few other people in the shops dropped whatever they had been doing and scattered. Melody took advantage of the panic to corner an elderly clerk before he could lock her out of his small market, and when he ducked behind the counter, she just reached over it and snagged him by his collar, dragging him up so she could look him in the eye.

"What the fragging hell is  _that?_ " she snapped.

The clerk squirmed in her grip. "Proximity alarm!" he yelped. "Imps! Let me go!"

Melody shoved him away. By the time he'd regained his balance, she was already long gone from his shop. She pushed past the last few stragglers and sprinted toward the hangar bay as fast as she could, switching on her comlink as she ran.

"Hal! We've got company!"

* * *

"I know, I know! Get back here!"

Hal switched off his own comlink to thwart any eavesdroppers and pressed one hand over an ear, trying to hear himself think. Like Han and Sasha and even Artoo, he'd hurried outside the  _Icarus_  as soon as the siren had gone off. The hangar bay was more crowded than he'd ever seen it and was generally in a state of absolute pandemonium. There were people running in ten different directions, people snatching up equipment and trying to hide it, people carrying weapons without any real indication that they knew how to use them - nothing good, in other words.

There was also no sign whatsoever of Ben.

"Mel's on her way back," he said to Han, who was watching the chaos with an absolutely unreadable expression. "Ben said we had another couple hours on the engines, but maybe we can - "

"Don't bother," Han said tightly. "It's Rage."

He'd known that, of course, but hearing it said out loud didn't make it any better.

"What do you mean it's Rage?" Sasha asked anxiously. "We have to find Ben and get out of here, right?"

Han patted her lightly on the shoulder and walked up the ramp, pausing long enough only to make shooing motions at Artoo. The little droid waited until he disappeared into the  _Icarus_  before beeping unhappily and rolling slowly away from the ship.

Sasha turned huge, frighteningly young eyes on Hal.

"Right?" she repeated, uncertainty creeping into her voice. "We're leaving, right?"

Hal scrubbed his face. "The engines aren't fixed, kid. There's Imps right on top of us. They know we're here. You tell me how we're supposed to leave."

"Then - then we have to find somewhere to hide and - "

"Are you fragging  _deaf?_  Didn't I just say they know we're here? Someone gave us away!"

He knew it wasn't fair to yell at her like that. She was just a kid - and yes, he'd already had who knew how many close calls with the Empire by the time he was her age, but Sasha wasn't Force-sensitive and her father hadn't been a would-be Jedi with a messiah complex. Even so, he couldn't help it. He'd spent his whole life dodging Imps, and to be caught like  _this_ , because of Han's favors and a pair of settlers -

"Where's Ben?" Sasha asked. She was trying so hard not to look scared that it almost seemed like she was standing at attention, squared shoulders and all. "I thought he was fixing the engines."

"Why would I know?" Hal muttered. "He ran off if he has any sense."

"He wouldn't have left me behind."

"You sure about that?" he asked, only to hate himself for it when she glared at him, clearly appalled at the very idea. "All right, all right. Sorry. He's not here, that's all that matters, and if you've got any sense you'll tell the Imps he was never on board in the first place."

"We're just gonna surrender?"

"I know how Han thinks." He frowned after Artoo in time to see the little droid vanish around a corner, just as the last few Ludlii miners finished grabbing equipment and disappearing from view. "No point getting more people killed than we have to."

He thought he could hear the whine of an approaching shuttle, or maybe that was just his own imagination.

* * *

Deep in the winding, poorly-lit maze of old shipping crates, storage containers, and rusting piles of obsolete spare parts, an argument was happening.

Or at least half an argument was happening, because Ben figured that an argument required two people to happen. Miri was trying to argue, sure. She was telling him they had to stay put, didn't he hear the siren, she knew back ways out of the storage bays and it'd take the Imps ages to search here and wasn't he  _listening?_  She was also holding onto his wrist with both hands, but that wasn't helping any more than her talking was, because Ben had the stocky build a Dune Sea settler who'd spent his whole life doing a lot of heavy lifting. When he had to be, he was strong. Since Miri didn't seem inclined to let go, he was towing her along.

He also wasn't responding to her. He wasn't saying or thinking anything at all, besides inner recriminations for leaving Sasha and the  _Icarus_ , until finally he stopped and rounded on Miri so fast that she slammed into him.

"It doesn't matter how big this place is if the Imps can hear us," he whispered as patiently as he could.

Miri didn't stop talking, but she did look embarrassed and lower her voice. "I'm  _sorry_ ," she said quietly, and she really did seem to mean it. "I'm serious, though. You can't go back. They'll just catch you."

"Then I guess they catch me," Ben said, even though as soon as the words left his mouth, he thought they sounded like the kind of stupid things one heard people say in those bad holodramas Sasha loved. The problem, he was realizing, was that just because they were silly didn't mean they weren't also true. "My cousin's there. So're the people who helped me. I need to go back."

"But - " Miri began.

Ben tried to look confident and reassuring, although considering he felt like he was about to throw up from sheer terror, he doubted he was doing a very good job. "You should probably go. The Imps will look here soon and I don't want you to get in trouble." He tried to smile. "Thanks for all the help and stuff. It was really nice of you."

That apparently wasn't the right thing to say, because Miri looked like she was about to burst into tears. He was so bad at this.

He was debating gently shaking her off and trying to find his own way out of the storage bays - no doubt getting himself hopelessly lost in the process - when she made a little whimpering noise and started pulling on his wrist again, this time in the opposite direction as before.

"This way," she whispered. "It's not just hiding behind a bunch of crates, I swear. You believe me, right?"

Ben nodded.

She started crying for real.

He was so,  _so_  bad at this.

He was also very glad that he'd agreed to follow Miri. She pulled him on a winding, tangled path through the storage bay, ducking behind boxes and squeezing between great looming piles of rusted machinery, until they wound up standing in front of a ladder. Miri put a finger to her lips and pointed up. The two of them climbed for what Ben was sure had to be three or four stories, until they emerged inside something that might have been a flight control tower, back when the big hangar bay had actually seen enough traffic to warrant one. Now it was just one more place to dump old junk - unused chairs, simple construction tools like hammers, even something that looked like an old flight helmet. In any other circumstances, Ben would have felt bad for whoever was in charge of hauling all that stuff up there in the first place.

As it was, he'd found something a little more interesting.

"No one will be able to find us here," Miri was saying, but Ben wasn't listening. He pushed past her and hurried over to the tower's controls. They didn't look like anything he'd seen before, but machines were machines. They weren't like people, who were messy and strange and did odd things for no reason. There was always a certain logic to them, in the way the circuits were laid out and even in the way the programs all locked together, and even the most eccentric ones were easy to understand if one just knew where to  _look -_

The controls flickered to life.

Miri leaned over his shoulder. "How did you - what are you doing?"

"I don't know," Ben said honestly. A moment later something clicked into place. "I think I can control the hangar bay doors from here. If I can keep them closed, maybe that'll give everyone time to hide."

"You can  _do_  that? I thought you just fix ships!"

"Landspeeders and vaporators, mostly."

Miri gaped at him. "The only reason we can hide up here is because no one uses this place anymore. If you start controlling the doors remotely - "

" - then they'll be able to find me," Ben finished. "I told you, it's okay if they catch me." She was still leaning over him, so he nodded to the far corner of the tower with all the abandoned tools. "Could you stand over there for a second? I need to be able to reach everything."

She bit her lip and stepped back, and Ben went back to trying to focus on the controls. They were very, very different from anything he'd ever used before, but he  _needed_  them to work, he  _needed_  to understand them - and now, suddenly, they were making perfect sense to him. He was very distantly aware of the fact that this meant something, and that when he had the time to think about it he probably wasn't going to like it, but that didn't matter right now. All that mattered was keeping the doors closed long enough to buy time - and that, at least, he could do.

Something blurred past him and smashed into the controls, destroying them in a shower of sparks and circuits and broken metal.

For a moment Ben could only stare down at the mess, stunned. Then, almost unwillingly, he turned to look at Miri.

She clutched the hammer like it was a lifeline, staring right at him and shaking her head from side to side.

"I'm trying to  _save_  you," she choked out around a sob. "I'm trying so hard to save you. Why can't you just  _stop?_ "

Something seemed to drop out from under Ben's feet, like he was in freefall and hadn't quite realized it yet.

"I'm sorry," Miri whispered. "I'm really,  _really_  sorry."

Ben tried to push his jumbled thoughts together into something like words. She wasn't making any sense.  _None_  of this was making any sense. "What - why did you - ?"

Miri looked up at him pleadingly.

"Because I'm the one who told the Imps you were here," she said.

* * *

The shuttle turned out to be a troop transports and a pair of small escort ships. They took their time about landing, apparently confident that their prey wasn't going anywhere. By the time the transport had disgorged stormtroopers into the hangar bay, Han and Hal had already wiped the ship's logs and navicomputer database, and Sasha had been enlisted to yank out the memory core and smash it to pieces with the nearest blunt instrument. The  _Icarus_  would never going to fly again - but given what was about to happen to its crew, that was far from Han's biggest concern.

All three of them exited the ship their hands up, Han in the front and Sasha kept between him and Hal to protect her as much as possible. Stormtroopers surrounded them and cuffed them instantly, but they weren't what interested him. It was the woman standing at the foot of the ramp that got his full attention.

"Captain Solo," she said, nodding politely. "I'm Lieutenant Archimedes. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I wish it were under better circumstances."

Han wasn't in the mood to bother with formalities. "Your boss too busy to come here himself?"

"Lord Rage looks forward to speaking with you and your crew." Lieutenant Archimedes glanced briefly at Hal and Sasha. " _All_  of your crew, Captain Solo."

"Don't know what you're talking about."

"Our intelligence is quite thorough. Your gunner appears to be absent, and you seem to have misplaced your astromech droid as well."

Behind him, Han could almost feel Sasha tense up. She had noticed the same thing he had, then - the person Archimedes had left out.

She didn't know Ben had been on board.

He kept his face carefully blank and tried to will Sasha to do the same.  _Don't blow it, kid. Don't blow it -_

By some miracle, Archimedes misread his expression. She nodded to one of the stormtrooper captains flanking her. "Please search his ship. Be sure to check for smuggling compartments," she added with a glance in Han's direction, as if they were sharing a joke between friends. Han had the sudden urge to punch her in the face.

Sasha didn't say a word.

"While they're conducting their search," Archimedes continued, "allow me to personally escort you back to the  _Retaliator_. Lord Rage is anxiously awaiting your arrival."

Han glanced back at Hal, whose blank expression was spoiled by the way all the blood had drained out of his face, and at Sasha, who just looked terrified.

He hoped Melody knew to look for Artoo - and he hoped Ben, wherever he was, had the sense not to try anything stupid.

* * *

The only sound in the control tower was Miri's ragged breathing.

Ben tried to ignore the cold pit in his gut, the way sheer fury seemed to suddenly cloud his vision, and desperately struggled to think. If this had been one of Sasha's holodramas, he would have known what to do. He would have known not to trust Miri in the first place, because she wouldn't have been kind and cheerful and helpful almost to a fault, and she wouldn't look much same now as she had when he'd first met her just a few hours ago - the same pretty red-headed girl with engine grease on her face, but not smiling anymore.

"Why?" he asked at last.

His voice sounded like he'd really been screaming, instead of just feeling like he wanted to.

"It was for Ludlii." Miri's voice was soft, but her words came faster and faster, as if she didn't know how to stop. "The bounty. It - it was so much money and we need it so badly here and my dad works so hard and I've got my little brothers to worry about, and I recognized your ship from the bounty notice when it was landing and I thought you'd all be Rebels, but then I met you and - " She finally broke off and looked back down at the hammer, as if surprised realize that she was still carrying it. It hit the floor with an echoing crash.

Ben clutched at the broken control panel. He was suddenly terrified of what he would do if he didn't find something to hold on to. "But you're trying to hide me."

"Because you're a regular person," Miri said wretchedly. "I told them you weren't on the ship. I said there was only one passenger. The Imps wouldn't have come if it was just the crew and I thought they wouldn't hurt a kid like your cousin - "

"The Imps killed her mother!"

Miri flinched.

Ben gripped the edge of the control panel with both hands, hard enough that the metal almost cut through his palms, and tried to get a grip on himself. He couldn't change what Miri had done. Sasha was counting on him, and if he didn't keep his head clear, he wasn't going to be able to help her or anyone else.

He glanced at the control tower's windows. They were almost completely blocked by junk and opaque with decades of grime. It would take too long to clean them. "Is there a place were we can see most of the hangar bay?" he asked.

Miri nodded slowly. "Yeah, but it'll be a lot harder to hide there. I don't think we should - "

"I'll go find it myself, then."

"No. No, I'll show you." Miri took a few steps toward the ladder, then stopped and looked back. "You understand, right? Why I did it? Wouldn't you do the same thing to save your home?"

Ben ignored her. He didn't dare answer.

He was too afraid he'd say "Yes."


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a very short chapter. Also, it's been about ninety kazillion years since I've updated....uh, anything really. Woe.

_“According to a study published by the Imperial Center for Population Management and Control, one in twenty Tatooine natives is either directly or indirectly involved with the Rebellion. Another study, this time conducted by the Outer Rim Health Board, suggests that more than third of Tatooine’s human settlers die before their thirtieth birthday.”_  
\- Mireth Dann,  _"We Are the Sun's Children": Life and Death on Desert Worlds,_ Carida Academy Ltd.

_“We have been instructed by the Board of Directors to disband immediately, as said Board of Directors appears to believe that we are in violation of Educational Code 917-C: Unlawful Formation of Subversive Organizations. We acknowledge receiving their instructions and regret to inform all involved that we will not be complying with their request. We also politely and respectfully suggest that the Board of Directors go jump off the nearest cliff.”_  
\- Lucéa Naberrie, "Second Statement of Student Concerns and Demands", a self-publication of the Santi-Solis Ladies' Academy's First All-Campus Student Council (banned: Imperial Board of Education)

* * *

If there was one thing Melody was familiar with, it was blasters.

But if there was a _second_ thing she was familiar with, it was Imp armor.

She had spent most of her childhood in the sort of back lanes and alleyways that even the rest of Ord Mantell considered disreputable. In places like that, stormtrooper armor wasn’t something to be frightened of. It was a _commodity_. A good breastplate, clean and undented and lacking in suspicious holes, was always in demand. Smugglers needed it, thugs of a certain persuasion needed it, even Rebels in denial about their hopeless cause needed it - which, not coincidentally, was one of the reasons Melody had fallen in with Solo and Hal in the first place.

Not the only reason, of course. Not even the main reason, which burned like black fire in her chest and would probably get her shoved out the nearest airlock if Solo ever found out about it.

It was _a_ reason, though. That ought to count for something.

In any event, an early childhood spent polishing helmets in dank basements for handfuls of credits had left her with an appreciation for undamaged Imp armor. Which was why, when she stepped out of one of Ludlii’s many unused storage closets and ambushed the Imp who had made the mistake of patrolling down that particular corridor, she didn’t shoot him in the back of the head.

Instead, she did what any Ord Mantell native with an enterprising spirit and a questionable conscience would do: she stunned him, dragged him into the closet, and removed the armor. _Then_ she shot him.

“Fragging heavy bastard,” she muttered as she shoved the now very dead Imp behind what looked like an industrial-sized floor cleaner. “Bet his armor smells.”

A disapproving beep came from the other side of the closet.

Melody waited until she had finished tucking the body out of sight before she scowled in the noise’s general direction. “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you too, you overgrown pile of scrap.”

The beep was definitely rude this time.

Melody rolled her eyes. Her first attempt at an ambush had netted her Solo’s astromech droid instead of an Imp - and while she was the first to admit that Artoo was good in a pinch, handy with picking locks and deleting security feeds and occasionally resorting to all-out droid-on-droid violence, he’d developed a personality in the however many decades it had been since his last memory wipe. It wasn’t a personality that liked her very much, either. The feeling was mutual, especially since Melody sometimes wondered if - unlike Solo and definitely unlike Hal - the nosy little droid had figured out what kind of person she actually _was_.

Fair was fair, though. If she had been in Artoo’s position, she wouldn’t have liked herself either.

She stacked the armor in a pile more or less in the middle of the storage closet and extracted one of the comm units from the helmet. “Here,” she said, holding it out to Artoo like a grudging peace offering and waiting until a clawed arm appeared long enough to grab it out of her hand. “Once I’m close to the transport, I’ll call you and find a way to get you aboard.”

Her answer was yet another beep, one that she’d learned meant something along the lines of ‘And how are you planning on doing that, genius?’

“I just killed an Imp for his nice new armor,” Melody said. She held up the helmet so its eyeports faced the little droid and grinned in a way that wouldn’t have been out of place in the worst and most dangerous corners of Ord Mantell. “What the hell do you _think_ I’m gonna do?”

Artoo’s answer was a resigned sort of warble.

Definitely should have shot him when she had the chance, Melody decided.

Fragging droid.

* * *

Lieutenant Archimedes was a firm believer in courtesy, regarding it in much the way that other beings might view their assorted deities. It was the solver of problems and the opener of doors, and she was its priest: an impeccably dressed woman with a slight Corellian accent and a habit of standing at attention more than might be necessary, seemingly harmless until one realized how much she knew and who she was completely loyal to.

The Tarkin Doctrine revolved around shows of overwhelming force. The Archimedes Doctrine, if such a thing existed, would have revolved around careful research and a selection of culturally-appropriate gift baskets sent to various secret insurrectionist hideouts, complete with thoughtful personalized toys for each of said insurrectionists’ children. Having a Star Destroyer in orbit certainly _helped_ , but it was amazing how many budding revolts could be nipped in the bud without wiping entire cities out of existence - and how much terror one could strike with a datapad and a wealth of information at one’s fingertips, for that matter.

Lord Rage supported her more often than not. He was a sensible man, lacking both his predecessor’s habit of choking unfortunate officers and the Emperor’s passion for oversized superweapons, very possibly because he’d blown one up back in the day. Most of the time, he saw the wisdom of smiles and soft words wielded like knives.

As for the times he didn’t...

Well, there was always his first order. And Lieutenant Archimedes was nothing if not obedient.

That order loomed large in her mind as she turned her attention to her new captives, but she refused to let any of her inner thoughts show on her face.

“I would like apologize for all this,” she said - ‘this’ being the dozens of stormtroopers lining the bulkheads of the troop transport, the handcuffs and restraints securing her prisoners to their seats, and the blast-proof doors protecting the cockpit. “I know it seems excessive, but given that you’ve made escaping from Imperial custody something of a hobby, Captain Solo, I’m sure you understand our concerns.”

Captain Solo didn’t even glance at her. For all that he was slouched in his seat in an apparent show of indifference, his gaze was darting around the transport as if searching for weaknesses. She might as well not have existed.

Sighing inwardly, she turned her attention to the other two prisoners. The Tatooine girl was attempting to be defiant, but mostly looked small and afraid. In the seat beside her, Hal Horn was just as terrified, albeit much better at hiding it. He was also glaring at Lieutenant Archimedes as if he wanted to burn holes in her skull, so she supposed he was the one she would have to talk to.

A pity, really. No matter how much Lord Rage disapproved - and he did, sometimes quite vocally - she had always admired Captain Solo’s innovative spirit.

“Mr. Horn,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “I’ve read a great deal about you and your abilities. For example, I’ve been led to believe that unlike Captain Solo’s son, you’re not actually capable of moving objects with the power of the Force. I’ve also been informed that you’re quite good at manipulating people with out, although not more than one or two at a time. Is all of this correct?”

Horn said nothing. The tightening of his mouth informed her that yes, it was more or less accurate.

She made a mental note to commend her intelligence network before she resumed speaking. “I’m sure you must be considering how to use the Force to influence me. Before you act on this impulse, however, I would like to inform you that the stormtroopers you see along the bulkheads have been given special orders. Specifically, if I or anyone else acts suspicious in any way, they are under very strict instructions to break every one of your captain’s fingers. If you persist, they will cut the girl’s hands off. Do I make myself clear?”

The girl made a strangled noise, her face going sheet-white. Horn just looked ill, but his own hands balled into fists. “Who the hell do you think you’re - ”

“ _Hal_.” Captain Solo was finally looking at her. His face was completely impossible to read. “He gets it, lady. Drop it.”

“Of course.” Lieutenant Archimedes leaned back in her seat slightly, allowing herself to relax just a little now that her warning had been given. “It really is an honor to meet you, Captain Solo. I’ve learned a great deal about you from Lord Rage’s files.”

The sound Captain Solo made might have been a laugh, but under the circumstances, she rather suspected it wasn’t.

“He’s looking forward to seeing you.”

“Yeah,” Captain Solo muttered, “I bet he is.” He looked away from her, going back to his scan of the transport, and that was it. She was dismissed again.

Lord Rage was probably going to kill him. Eventually, anyway. Lieutenant Archimedes was well aware of that, just as she was aware of what would happen to Horn.

She allowed the slightest frown to show on her face. Lord Rage’s first order felt like the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders. He had left the whys and hows of implementing it up to her. Drastic measures, he had made it clear, were very much allowed.

Anything was allowed, provided it accomplished her goals.

Many years ago, before Lord Rage had earned her unwavering loyalty, he had taught her that desperation and suicidal bravery had their places in the grand scheme of things, just as much as polite gestures did. It was something she had learned down the barrel of a blaster, and it was a lesson she reminded herself of as often as possible.

It was entirely possibly that was why she admired Captain Solo as much as she did.

She forced herself to sit calmly in her seat, schooled her face into impassiveness. No, she told herself. Courtesy first. Reason first. Present the prisoners to Rage and move on to the next task. It wasn’t time to implement that particular order yet.

Soon, perhaps. Sooner than she would have liked.

But not yet.

* * *

Miri’s new hiding place turned out to be little more than a pile of crates someone had shoved in front of a storage bay door. It was also occupied by a stormtrooper and an astromech droid - who, after a bit of panicked flailing and muffled yells all around, proved to be Melody and Artoo.

“Why the hell weren’t you with the _Icarus_?” Melody snapped at Ben once everyone had settled down and ducked out of sight behind the crates. Her helmet was off and resting on the floor next to her, but she still had an Imp blaster rifle gripped in both gloved hands. “Why didn’t you get captured like everyone else?”

Ben grimaced. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t expected this, but… “Everyone else was captured?”

“No, they’re visiting Rage for _fun_.” Melody snarled. “Of course they were fragging captured! Now answer the damn question.”

He felt more than heard Miri’s sharp intake of breath next to him. Maybe that was why he answered the way he did, lying by omission - or maybe it was the fact that Melody looked a half-second away from using that weapon of hers. “Miri said there might be some spare parts back here.”

“And I wouldn’t let him go back,” Miri added. Her voice sounded steadier than it had back in hangar bay control room, although her eyes were still red-rimmed. “Ben wanted to go back to the ship as soon as the sirens started. It’s not his fault.”

Melody looked from one to the other. Whatever she saw made her narrow her eyes, but if she had any suspicions, she kept them to herself - although the look she gave Ben wasn’t anything close to friendly. “So what’s your brilliant plan now, kid?”

“Get Sasha back.”

“And how the _hell_ do you plan on doing that?”

Ben hesitated. He hadn’t gotten that far yet. “Find more stormtrooper armor and sneak on board, I guess. I think I remember my uncle telling me a story about that.”

Melody made a disgusted noise and muttered something that sounded like “fragging Solo”.

He decided to ignore her. “It’s not a terrible plan,” he muttered.

“And weren’t you planning the exact same thing?” Miri added, although between Melody’s laser-sharp glare and the fact that some deep dark terrible part of him still wanted to scream at her for what she had done, Ben wished she would stay quiet.

“I’ve got experience impersonating Imps,” Melody said. “Ask Solo about our little Nar Shaddaa adventure sometime, once I’m done saving his hide.” She looked back at Ben again. “Where were you planning on getting your armor, huh?”

Ben barely managed not to scowl at her. “I’ll figure out something. Where did you get yours?”

“I stole it from an Imp,” Melody said as if this was the most obvious thing in the galaxy.

Ben very nearly rolled his eyes. He probably would have, if the situation weren’t quite so dire, and also if he were Sasha and prone to doing that kind of thing. “I guessed that. I meant how did you do it. What happened to the Imp?”

“Shot him.”

Miri made a noise like she was about to throw up. Ben didn’t blame her - something about the way Melody shrugged as she spoke, casual and matter-of-fact, made his own stomach heave - but he told himself he didn’t have the time to feel nauseous. “He’s dead?”

Melody gave him a look of pure, unadulterated disdain.

He decided asking how much experience she had killing Imps was very _very_ high on the list of things he never wanted to do. “So how were _you_ planning on getting on the Star Destroyer?” he asked instead. “Since you seem to know so much.”

“You missed two of the Imp ships. A transport and an escort already left. They’re the ones that are taking everyone else to Rage.” Melody was all business now that no one was questioning her ability to murder stormtroopers and steal their armor. “That second ship won’t leave unless they finish their search. They’ve either got a scanning crew here already or they’re waiting for one. The only way to get them to leave sooner is to give them a good reason to.”

“You mean if they catch one of us.”

“I was gonna just drag Artoo here over to the ship and say I found him, but yeah, that’s the plan.”

Ben nodded. He peered over the top of the crates into the hangar bay, trying and failing to count how many Imps were milling around. For a moment all he wanted was the peace and quiet of the garage, the smell of engine oil and the thrum of cooling pipes - but home would never be home again, not without Aunt Olivea and certainly not without Sasha. Wishing he were anywhere else in the galaxy than here - wishing he had someone to rely on besides a girl he couldn’t trust and a gunner who spoke about killing like it was as normal to her as breathing - wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Artoo and I can be your prisoners, then. You can tell the Imps Miri found us and reported us, so that way Ludlii won’t get in trouble. That should work, right?”

“Yeah, assuming no one blows our cover.”

“About that.” Ben reached into his pocket and carefully removed the data chip he had been carrying since that fateful evening in Draco’s Well. “I picked up this message by accident when I was repairing a holoproj.”

“I know,” Melody said. “Your cousin told us.” But she was staring at the chip as if it were poisonous.

Ben held it out to her.

There was a long, tense silence before she finally reached out and took it. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Give it to Captain Solo, maybe. I don’t know what it is, but the Imps killed a lot of people in my settlement trying to find it. I don’t think it’s something they should get back.”

“Fine,” Melody muttered, closing her fingers around the chip. “But only until we finish this stupid rescue. This isn’t my fragging responsibility.”

“I know,” Ben said softly. “It’s mine. If I hadn’t found that message, none of this would have happened.” And that brought him to the other thing that had been looming over him since the moment the sirens had started - the realization he had come to as Miri had tried to drag him into the safety of the storage bays. It didn’t matter what happened to him, just as long as Sasha was safe.

Maybe there was some truth to her holodramas after all.

“Listen,” he said, before Melody could bristle at him again. “If worse comes to worst, there’s something I can do to keep the Imps distracted. It might give you enough time to rescue Sasha and the others. I probably won't be able to take the chip back, though, so you'll have to take care of it for me.”

“Oh, this is gonna be good,” Melody grumbled under her breath. "Please. Tell me. How the hell are  _you_ going to keep the Imps distracted?"

He tried to smile. “By telling Rage my name, apparently.”

She should have laughed, but she didn’t. Something about Melody seemed to freeze as she stared at him, an expression crossing her face that might have been some kind of belated, horrified recognition.

Or maybe she just wasn’t used to stupid Tatooine settlers and was looking at him like he was a strange new lifeform. That was probably the more likely possibility.

Ben actually did roll his eyes then. “I didn’t say it was a great backup plan.”

“No, that’s not - ” She seemed to think better of whatever she had been about to say. A moment later the strange expression was gone and she was scowling at everyone as if it had never happened. “Artoo, how’s the kid’s idea sound to you? About him and you both being my prisoners? Think you can cut through binders in a hurry once we're on our way to the Star Destroyer?”

The little droid beeped something that sounded like an affirmative.

“Right.” Melody looked at Miri now. “You okay with this?”

Miri shook her head.

“Fine. Sit this out if you want. I’ll stun you and stick you in a closet if it’ll make you feel better.” Melody turned back to Ben. “You’re sure?”

About the brilliance of their plan? No, not particularly. About saving Sasha? “Yeah.”

“Let’s see how loose I can make these binders on you - ”

“ _Don’t_.”

Everyone, Artoo included, looked at Miri.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t. Ben can’t be the prisoner.”

“Why the kriffing hell not?” Melody muttered, clearly at the end of a very short rope.

And suddenly Ben knew exactly what Miri was going to say - exactly what she was going to admit - but the realization came a half-second too late to do anything about it.

“I’m the one who told the Imps about you,” Miri whispered.

Melody had her blaster rifle up and leveled at Miri’s face before Ben had time to register what was happening. But she didn’t pull the trigger - and she could have, Ben knew. She could have killed Miri before she had finished her sentence.

He had never seen anyone move that fast, not even in holos.

Miri flinched, but she didn’t look away from Melody. “I told them Ben wasn’t on your ship. They don’t think he’s here. If they see him, they’ll know I lied. My family - they’ll punish - “ Her voice hitched and she blinked quickly, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

Anger had twisted Melody's face into something almost inhuman. Somehow, Miri still hadn’t looked away from her.

Ben was afraid to breathe.

“My whole family’s here,” Miri said quietly. “Please.”

Melody lowered the rifle.

"Ben,” she said through clenched teeth, not even looking at him. “Change of plans. Put on the armor. You’re gonna be the Imp.”


	9. Chapter 9

_“The Santi-Solis Ladies’ Academy prides itself on training the elite of Imperial society to become the leaders of tomorrow. The fact that it sees fit to restrict its course of study to jingoist propaganda, discouraging both discourse and dissent, makes one wonder what kind of individual it considers a ‘leader of tomorrow’ to be.”_   
_\- Jessa Calrissian, “First Statement of Student Concerns and Demands”, a self-publication of the Santi-Solis Ladies’ Academy’s First All-Campus Student Council (banned: Imperial Board of Education)_

_“Only the dead can afford to be cryptic.”_   
_\- Naboo proverb_

 

**The Circle**   
**Chapter Nine**

The planet Mustafar had very little to recommend it. While it was a natural source of mineral wealth, practically crawling with mining droids and mobile refineries now that the Empire had gotten around to investing in it, the inhospitable conditions made setting foot on it an absolute misery. And yet Lucéa Naberrie was there all the same, a heat-reflecting white cloak draped over her shoulders and a hood pulled up to cover her head. Her arms were folded and her lips were pursed, and if she had been on her homeworld, anyone she so much as glanced at would have leapt to do her bidding.

But this wasn’t Naboo and the young man standing a short distance away from her wasn’t one of the self-serving politicians and Imperial cronies she wrangled on a daily basis. He was far more important than them.

That didn’t make him any less of an enigma.

“I wasn’t lying,” she said, although he hadn’t suggested anything of the kind. In fact, he hadn’t said anything at all. For long minutes, all Anakin Organa had done was stand unnecessarily close to the molten rivers of rock, a strange and still figure who made even less sense here than he did in more welcoming parts of the galaxy. “This _is_ the world listed in all the records I have access to.”

Anakin finally tilted his head just enough to look at her. “I never said you were lying.”

“You’ve barely said anything. For quite a while now.”

“I’m listening.”

Lucéa permitted herself one small exasperated sigh. She knew that Anakin was vague and peculiar at the best of times - it was a symptom of being the very last of the Jedi, apparently - but this was getting ridiculous. “The lava must be a truly amazing conversationalist.”

His expression suggested that yes, perhaps the lava _was_ witty and captivating when it chose to be.

“Then it’s already informed you that what’s left of that Separatist base you were so interested in is all the way over there?”

He just grinned at her and turned his attention back to the churning orange river and the black rocks. Lucéa wasn’t sure what it meant that he didn’t say anything one way or the other.

It could have been worse, she supposed. He could have told her that yes, it had.

Lucéa believed in the Force, but that was rather like saying she believed in Core sector banking regulations - which was to say that it was a tool, a means to an end, and could be used for good or bad depending on who happened to be wielding it at the moment. She had inherited her ambivalent attitude from her mother, a professional skeptic if ever there was one. The Naberries were idealists, after all, but they were also a rich and powerful family made up of consummate politicians. They used any advantage they had, no matter how secretive and powerful, to further their own objectives.

That complicated mesh of personal relationships and political goals was what had brought her into contact - and even, eventually, into a tentative sort of friendship - with Anakin. And if certain rumors were to be believed, their particular relationship was very close indeed.

Lucéa settled herself on one of the least uncomfortable rocks, studying Anakin even as she resigned herself to waiting until he finished listening to whatever-it-was the lava had decided to tell him. There were topics that simply weren’t discussed in her family, most of which involved her otherwise revered Great-Aunt Padmé. In particular, the persistent story of said great-aunt’s secret marriage to a Jedi was a whispered thing among the Naberrie children, never to be brought up in the adults’ presence.

But the Empire was far better at erasing records than memory and Lucéa was nothing if not stubborn. Decades ago, when the Empire was still a scheme Palpatine had yet to implement and Lucéa’s own mother was still a little girl, there had been a famous and much-celebrated Jedi Knight named Anakin Skywalker. At the very least, he had been one of Great-Aunt Padmé’s close acquaintances, and like Great-Aunt Padmé herself, he was a sort of ghost in the Naberrie household - an almost tangible thing that the family lived in fear of, lest his association with them bring the wrath of the Emperor down on their heads.

Great-Aunt Padmé had been pregnant shortly before she died. It had been one of the most poorly-kept secrets on Naboo.

Bail Organa had been worked closely with Great-Aunt Padmé in the Imperial Senate and had shared many of the same political views. Leia Organa, supposedly one of the most powerful and formidable Jedi in recorded history, had been adopted into the Alderaanian royal family and had named her own son Anakin, perhaps after a man who had died before she was born.

It was an odd collection of coincidences. Too odd, Lucéa thought.

She wasn’t sure if she wanted her theory to be right or not. The Naberrie family’s political power had grown, but these days it depended on the goodwill of the King of Naboo, who himself relied on the Empire and the moffs. It was bad enough that she was even in contact with Anakin, however surreptitiously, and had been ever since her suspicions had first burst into being. If someone managed to link her family to Leia Organa’s or Anakin Skywalker’s by blood, it would destroy the Naberries - and with them, everything and everyone they protected.

But it was better than the alternative. There was another Skywalker out there in the galaxy, and it was better to share blood with the last of the Jedi than with the man who had abandoned them under such mysterious circumstances.

People related to Darth Rage had an unfortunate habit of meeting very tragic premature deaths.

“Why are you so interested in the Separatists?” she asked, mostly to distract herself from her own thoughts.

Anakin blinked at her as if he had forgotten that she was there. “I’m not, really. I’m interested in what happened to the person who killed them.”

“What, Vader?” That had always been the story, anyway. Lucéa held no particular interest in or sympathy for the Separatists, a holdover from the Naboo’s long memories of the Trade Federation and its blockade, but the official story of a pack of rogue Jedi slaughtering everyone had never rung true.

Anakin nodded. “I have a personal interest in him, you could say.”

The last of the Jedi, searching for traces of the enigmatic and long-dead man who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere and slaughtered his order. “Wouldn’t it be better to concern yourself with defeating Rage?”

“Ghosts are usually easier to beat than living people.” Anakin tilted his face toward the sky, although what he hoped to see there was quite beyond Lucéa. There were faint lines around his eyes and a tired set to his mouth, a sort of sadness that seemed to rest heavily on his shoulders. Looking at him like this, it was difficult to remember than he was only a few years older than Lucéa herself. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stick to battles I have a chance of winning.”

He didn’t have a prayer of besting Rage, much less Palpatine. Dedicated though he was, Anakin wasn’t his mother, much as the Rebellion was not what it had once been. This, too, was a poorly-kept secret.

And without the hope that Leia Organa had once brought so suddenly and brilliantly to life, the Rebel Alliance - traces of which Lucéa and her mother sheltered behind Naberrie political clout, Gungan shield generators, and Great-Aunt Padmé’s reputation - was rapidly spiraling into despair. It was something Lucéa had spent her whole life observing, helpless to stop.

“Have your ghosts told you anything?” she asked. _Was anything about this visit worthwhile?_ she very much wanted to add.

Anakin’s brow creased into a frown.

“If you found the worst person in the galaxy dying on a riverbank,” he asked suddenly, “what would you do?”

“Shoot them and put them out of their misery,” Lucéa answered without giving the matter any further thought. “What does that have to do with Mustafar?”

He finally dropped his gaze from the sky to look at her. His eyes were very, very old. “I sensed something through the Force just now.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Not all of us see the galaxy through the Force, Organa.”

“Then think of it like seeing a storm in the distance.” He lifted his shoulders in a sort of resigned shrug. “I don’t know when it’s coming exactly, but it _will_ come.”

In Lucéa’s experience, storms - like the ten thousand other metaphors that Jedi seemed to collect as they grew older - usually came in the form of stormtroopers and blaster fire. “And how bad will it be this time?”

“That depends.”

“On what, exactly?”

Anakin’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, but then again, it almost never did. “On whether someone out there feels the same as you,” he said.

* * *

Of all the things that holodramas glossed over, Ben decided that the fact that stormtroopers couldn’t be bothered to _bathe_ was somewhere near the top of the list.

“Don’t they have soap on Star Destroyers?” he muttered under his breath, eyeballing an armguard as if it had personally offended him.

It was a rhetorical question - more to ignore the fact that he was now wearing a dead Imp’s armor than to point out that yes, said armor did indeed smell - but Melody wrinkled her nose anyway. She had certainly seemed happy to strip every last white-plated bit off and chuck it in Ben’s general direction. “Dunno,” she said. “Never met a stormtrooper who didn’t smell like an old sock.”

He paused halfway through trying to stuff his sleeve out of sight under the armguard. Not that he really wanted to know the answer to the obvious question, but… “Why do you know what stormtroopers smell like?”

“Because my life’s been fragging _exciting_ , farmboy.” Melody flashed a grin, or at least showed a lot of teeth. “Now get the damn armor on. I’m gonna go have a little talk with someone.”

The ‘someone’ in question was Miri, who had had the good sense to retreat to the far corner of their hiding place after her confrontation with Melody. She hadn’t said anything since, but when Artoo had followed her and held some kind of quiet, one-sided, beep-filled conversation with her, no one had objected.

Ben set to work on the other armguard, watching with more than a little concern as Melody crouched on Miri’s other side, looking like nothing so much as a coiled krayt dragon ready to spring on its prey.

Because Melody was _dangerous_. More than that, she was a kind of danger Ben thought he recognized.

Imps and coded messages and rebellions were all far beyond him, belonging as they did outside of Draco’s Well, but he had repaired landspeeders and swoops for plenty of different customers in the family garage. Most of them had been moisture farmers or other settlers of some sort. A few - and somehow he had always known which ones they were the moment they walked through the door, no matter what they looked like - had been anything but.

The stories and holodramas Sasha loved so much had monsters cast from a mold, easily recognizable and brimming over with evil. Tatooine’s monsters - much, Ben suspected, like most monsters everywhere - were casual and vicious, ordinary-looking beings with the ugly pieces of themselves hidden inside them, who had no qualms about handing an indebted settler family over to slavers or working for the worst of the Hutts. They had a horrible slippery sort of darkness around them, oily and cold, and sometimes their swoops and skiffs felt as terrible as they did.

Those were the customers who had never been left alone in the garage with Uncle Gavin or Aunt Olivea, who had never been allowed to know Sasha even existed if Ben could help it.

But they had hardly ever come to Draco’s Well. That had always been one of the advantages to being too small and boring for others to care about - or at least it had been.

That darkness was similar to what he had sensed around Padreic the odd-jobs-man, except with Padreic it had been like an old stain, faded to a cold buzzing sort of wrongness nagging at the edges of Ben’s mind. And it was the beginnings of that darkness that he could feel around Melody - not in her bones, not yet, but coiled up around her, pieces of it sunk into her like fangs.

He watched Melody whisper something inaudible to Miri - watched Miri’s expression close up, papered over in guilt, until that stubborn protective core he’d glimpsed once or twice came to the fore and she started angrily whispering back - and he wondered which one he trusted more, the girl who had given his cousin to Rage or the gunner who might be all the more dangerous because she was a recognizable sort of threat.

“Hey,” he called, because the whispering was escalating to the point where it wasn’t actually whispering at all. “Can we go over this plan again?”

Melody’s expression of utter disdain could have doubled as a long-range weapon, but the question did what Ben had wanted it to and quieted her down. “For the _last fragging time_ ,” she ground out. “Artoo and I will get ourselves captured. You march into the Icarus like you’re supposed to be guarding the damn thing, seal it up, and wait to get towed to the Star Destroyer’s hangar bay. Then come get us out of the damn detention cells.” She grinned, or at least showed a lot of teeth. “See? Simple.”

All things considered, it was the worst plan Ben had ever heard. Its only saving grace - _barely_ \- was that Melody didn’t trust him to act like a normal Imp and had instructed him to stay out of sight on the Icarus.

Speaking of which. “What if there are other Imps on the Icarus? What do I say?”

Melody shrugged. “Say Imp things.”

“I grew up in a Dune Sea settlement,” Ben pointed out with what he felt was heroic patience. “I have no idea how Imps talk. Don’t they have codes or something?”

“You ever played sabacc, kid?”

Ben shook his head.

“Ever played any game where you have to bluff?”

“Does cheating at _T.I.E. Bomber_ count?.”

Melody muttered several things about settlers, none of them complimentary, but she settled herself right in front of him, crosslegged on the floor with her hands on her knees, and looked at him intently. “All right. Want me to tell you how to to fool an Imp?”

_Not really._ “I guess so.”

“You _lie_ , kid. Tell just enough of the truth to make it sound believable and make up the rest. How fragging hard can that be?”

_Pretty hard_ , Ben thought privately, but he decided not to mention that. He put the stormtrooper helmet in his lap and turned it so the eyeports were looking up at him, trying not to wonder what its previous owner’s name had been. “What should we do with that data chip?” he asked instead.

“It’s all yours,” Melody said, producing it from somewhere and tossing it back at him. “I’m pretty damn brilliant at smuggling things, but I can’t hide that if they decide to search me.”

“They’ll search me too, if I get caught.”

Her grin was positively _feral_ this time. “Then don’t.”

That didn’t make him feel better at all. He stashed the data chip in what he hoped was a hard-to-find pocket and looked down at the helmet again. Maybe its previous owner had also had a cousin to look after.

_Time to get this over with_ , he thought, and started to stand up.

Melody grabbed him and pulled him right back down.

Ben very nearly yelled at her. “ _Now_ what?”

She just looked him right in the eyes. All traces of a smile had vanished, replaced by the most serious expression he had ever seen on her. “Kid. Ben. Do me a favor.” She clapped a hand on his shoulder, hard enough that he imagined he could feel her fingers through the armor. “From here on out, don’t tell anyone your real name. Not unless you have to.”

“Not you too.”

“Yeah, me too. I don’t want to get handed over to interrogation droids because you can’t keep your mouth shut. Got it?”

He didn’t, not really. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Everyone keeps telling me to be careful about my name. I got it.”

But that still didn’t seem to satisfy Melody. “You don’t know,” she said after a moment, her expression darkening like a stormcloud. “You don’t even fragging _know_. I’m gonna _kill_ Solo.”

“Could you hold off killing him until he tells me what’s going on?” Ben said, more testily than he’d meant to. “If everyone thinks my name is going to get the _Emperor_ after me, I’d like to know why!”

He hadn’t meant to raise his voice, either. But then again, he hadn’t expected to do a whole lot of things.

Melody just stared at him with those unreadable black eyes of hers. Then she let out a long sigh and folded her arms across her chest as if trying to protect herself. When she spoke again, she sounded much younger than before.

“Don’t you know who else had a name like yours?”

Ben thought of Hermit’s Hut and the red lightsaber and tried not to shiver. “Old Kenobi. Rage’s teacher. I know.”

“Not who I meant, kid.”

“Then who _did_ you mean?”

Melody’s lip curled up into a snarl. “Rage’s _son_ ,” she spat out, like the words themselves were poison. “You’ve got the same fragging name as Rage’s dead son and that might give people _ideas_. You happy now?”

He wasn’t. What Melody was implying was so absurd that it took him a moment to wrap his head around it. “That’s stupid,” he blurted out. “I’m not Rage’s son.”

His answer was a snort. “Of course you’re not, idiot. The kid died years ago. But you’re the same age, you’ve got the same name, you’re from his homeworld, and from what Solo told me once, Rage was a fragging miracle baby himself.” She shrugged. “How suspicious would you be, if you were the Emperor?”

“Not very.” This had to be some sort of horrible joke. “There must be billions of Bens out there. It's not exactly a rare name.”

Melody looked unconvinced.

“It’s just a _name_ ,” Ben said, trying not to sound like he was pleading. “It’s not going to kill me. The Emperor’s not stupid.”

“You’ve got no idea what the Emperor is,” Melody muttered darkly.

Ben opened his mouth and shut it again. The unfairness of it all was too much for him to put into words. “It’s just a name,” he repeated, more quietly than before.

“Maybe it is,” Melody said, “but if Rage or the Emperor ever hears it, you kill everyone on the _Icarus_ , same as if you pulled the trigger yourself.” She leaned forward, until it was all he could do not to scramble back from her. There was something terrible in her eyes, something about the shadows and darkness sliding around her that suggested she knew this from horrible personal experience. “So you fragging p _romise me_ ,” she ground out through clenched teeth, “or I shoot you right here.”

It was her eyes, more than any fear of the Emperor or distaste at being potentially mistaken for Rage’s long-dead child or even the threats, that finally made him nod. “I promise.”

"You better mean it," she muttered. When he shrugged helplessly at her, she gave him one more angry look and walked back to Artoo.

Ben let out a sigh. Collecting promises was another thing he had never expected to do, and he was already breaking one of them. The rescue plan - sneaking aboard a _Star Destroyer_ to save Sasha - almost certainly qualified as doing something stupid, and hadn't he told Uncle Gavin he wouldn't do anything like that?

He wondered if Uncle Gavin was still alive.

“Ben?”

It was Miri this time, probably just staying as far away from Melody as possible. He stood up quickly and turned his back as much as he could, refusing to look at her. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Then just listen. Please.”

He didn’t answer, contenting himself with fiddling with some imaginary circuits inside the stormtrooper helmet. Not answering was the general point of ignoring people.

Miri decided to keep talking anyway. He had only known her for a few hours, but he was starting to get the impression that Miri did a lot of things without considering whether or not they were a good idea. “If something happens - if things don’t go well, I mean - ” She took a deep breath and started again. “You can blame me however you want. Shoot me, I don’t care. This is my fault and I know it. Just don’t do anything to Ludlii. No one told Rage about your cousin but me.”

Ben forgot that he didn’t want anything to do with her. Now he just stared. Somehow she was making even less sense than Melody. “Why would I do anything to Ludlii?”

“Rage was the one who destroyed the Death Star. Why would he do what he did to Cree's Cradle? Why would he join up with the Emperor in the first place?” Miri's voice growing steadier with each word. “I don’t know what happens to people after the Empire catches them, but I know it changes them sometimes. If they're..." She twitched her fingers at him in a kind of aborted gesture. "If they're like you."

"Like me," Ben echoed. He couldn't quite make it a question, much less ignore the sick sour feeling in his stomach.

Miri met his eyes. Whatever horrible decisions she had made and kept making, no one could say Miri wasn't brave. "If they can fix things they've never seen before. If they can use the Force."

He couldn't even open his mouth to deny it. It wasn't true, he told himself, of course it wasn't, because things like this only happened to people stupid enough to want to leave home - but he couldn't quite form a denial, either.

Everyone in Draco's Well had always told him he was a practical and level-headed boy. It turned out that meant he wasn't very good at self-delusion.

"I'm not going to get caught," he said, and then turned away before Miri could answer with the obvious _But what if you do?_  and leave him with no response that meant anything. The heavy cold feeling from Padreic's house settled on him like a funeral shroud as he put on the helmet. "Can we go now? Before I get too nervous to hold a blaster rifle?"

Melody rolled her eyes at him. If he hadn't seen her a minute ago, he would never have believed she was capable of being serious about anything.

"Thought you would never ask," she said.

Then, in a motion so smooth and fluid he hardly saw it, she ripped the blaster rifle out of his grip, jammed her elbow into the small open space between the chestplate and the helmet, and sent him to his knees gagging and trying to suck down air. Before he even hit the floor, she was firing over his head. Even through his helmet, even though he was coughing and gasping, he smelled seared flesh and heard Miri's horrible  _scream_.

"Try to act wounded," Melody muttered as she pointed the blaster rifle right at him. "Here they come." Her teeth pulled back over her lips and maybe it was a smile too, but Ben couldn't tell.

That was the other thing Sasha's holodramas had gotten wrong, he realized dimly as the sounds of shouts and running feet came hurrying towards them.

In the stories, the good guys never had monsters of their own.


	10. Chapter 10

_"Given the rumors of espionage rings that surrounded Skywalker immediately after his defection - indeed, given the setbacks and defeats our Empire suffered at the time - it must be argued that his initial change of loyalties was anything but whole-hearted. Is it truly inconceivable that he believed in Organa just as unconditionally as she seems to have believed in him?"_  
\- Hominara Alaqar, _'But This We Hold True': A Reconsideration of Leia Organa and the Second Jedi Order_ , Chandrila Upper University Publishing House (banned: Imperial Board of Culture)

 _Captain Fantastik: New plan, men. We blast our way to that reactor and blow it sky-high._  
 _Lieutenant Drai: Why do your plans always end in explosions, sir?_  
 _\- Captain Fantastik and the Thunder T.I.E.s,_ Episode 216 "The Ghosts in the Jungle" 

  
**The Circle**   
**Chapter Ten**

  
Ever since the disaster at Bespin, Han had made a point to avoid close encounters with the Empire. He wasn't always successful, but on the rare occasions when he hadn't been able to outrun, outfly, or outshoot whichever unfortunate batch of Imps happened to be chasing him, he had proven more than up to the task of outsmarting them.

He hadn't realized just how much his reputation had preceded him.

"Don't you think you're overdoing it?" he asked out of the corner of his mouth, peering down the transport's boarding ramp into a hangar bay filled to the brim with stormtroopers.

Lieutenant Archimedes quirked her lips into a small smile. "Think of it as a challenge, Captain Solo. Now please exit the transport. I'd prefer not to stun you and drag you out by your ankles, but I will if I have to."

She probably would, too. From what little Han knew about her, she was a stickler for following orders. If she had been told to get him to the Star Destroyer, then that was exactly what she would do, one way or another.

All things considered, he decided to exit the transport with his dignity intact.

He stepped off the ramp and into the hangar bay, taking quick stock of the exits. This was one of the newer Star Destroyers, built after Leia had died and the Rebellion had been cut down from serious threat to minor nuisance, so many of the security flaws and loopholes he was so used to exploiting just weren't there anymore. It was also unique in the fact that the crew was hand-picked. The captain, Jarus Kraiz, had all the charm and personality of a dishrag, but he was a good strategist and tactician. Like almost everyone else on the ship - right down to the most inexperienced stormtroopers - he was from an Outer Rim world.

The result - according to all the briefings and intelligence reports Han had seen and all the rumors he had picked up in bits and pieces around the galaxy - was that the _Retaliator_ didn't quite work like a normal Imp ship. That made it very dangerous and very hard to predict.

And the reason it was allowed to get away with as much as it did was walking towards Han through a parting sea of white helmets and blaster rifles.

Han forgot all about looking for nonexistent escape routes. "Luke," he said before he could stop himself.

Luke - _not Luke_ , Han reminded himself - seemed about as nonthreatening as he had the last time Han had seen him in person, long decades before. He came to a stop a few paces away and stood with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing what looked like a simplified black version of an Imperial officer's uniform.

He didn't _look_ like a different person. Leia had mentioned that. _"Even his eyes,"_ she had said, as if that had been particularly troubling to her. _"Even his eyes are the same."_

Han thought he understood why that small detail had bothered her so much. It was easy to pretend someone was just another random Imp from halfway across the galaxy. It was another matter entirely when that person was just steps away, wearing a look that belonged less on the Emperor's attack dog and more on a frazzled junior officer who hadn't had the time to sit down with a proper cup of caf.

"Hello, Han." Even his voice sounded tired and put-upon rather than frightening. "What are you doing here?"

Han shrugged expansively. "Dunno. Why don't you ask your friend back there in the transport?"

His only answer was a frown. Then Luke - _Rage_ , Han reminded himself, because it made it that much easier to keep the man in front of him separate from the stupid idealistic kid he'd last seen on Hoth - then _Rage_ turned his attention to Hal and Sasha, whom Archimedes was only now prodding down the ramp.

Hal stopped dead as he caught sight of Rage. All the blood drained out of his face and he took what must have been an instinctive step backwards, only stopping when his back hit one of the ramp's support struts.

"I'd heard you were gunrunning with Corran Horn's son," Rage said to Han. "This is him, isn't it?"

Hal's eyes narrowed and his lip curled back in a defiant snarl. "That's right," he ground out, each word rough and thick with anger. "Corran Horn was _my father_ and you can go to _hell_ for - "

"Hal!" Han snapped.

His answer was a particularly murderous glare, but at least Hal shut up.

Rage rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I think I see the resemblance," he muttered before glancing over at Sasha, who was frozen in place next to Archimedes. She must have decided the person who had just threatened to maim her was the lesser of two evils. "And you would be the girl from Tatooine."

Archimedes poked her in the shoulder. She nodded once, stiffly.

"I don't suppose you know where your brother is."

Sasha's eyes went very wide and she shook her head so fast that her braid whipped behind her.

Han didn't need the Force to see the look Hal threw at him. Not only had Melody and Artoo managed to elude capture so far - as evidenced by the fact that no one had tried to blow up the power core or do anything equally ridiculous and unhelpful - but so had Ben. Rage didn't even know Ben wasn't Sasha's brother.

He gave Hal a look that Leia or Chewie would have instantly understand as 'shut up and play stupid'. It took a few moments for Hal to catch on, and even then his face smoothed into the worst and most unconvincing sabacc face Han had ever seen.

Not that he could blame him. Han knew plenty about the Alliance and was the father of the last Jedi, so he had a date with an interrogation droid in his future, no doubt followed by a firing squad. But Hal was in for much worse and they both knew it. Han had seen his copilot's future in the string of old students and friends Leia and been forced to fight and sometimes kill - Imperial operatives with familiar faces and red lightsabers.

Force-users who fell into the Emperor's hands had a habit of turning into something terrible in the end. The proof of that was standing right in front of him.

The only person who had a prayer of anything - escape, asking for help, even just getting a warning to Anakin and the Alliance leadership - was Sasha.

Rage knew that too, of course. He had been looking from one prisoner to the other as if debating what in the galaxy he was supposed to do with them. "Lieutenant Archimedes," he finally said. "Take the girl to one of the debriefing rooms and have one of the crew quarters prepared for her. Keep a guard on her, but don't move her to a detention cell unless it's necessary."

It was a concession, Han knew - but it was also a warning intended for him. Plenty of children younger than Sasha wound up in detention bays. Whether or not Sasha stayed out of one undoubtedly depended on Han's good behavior, cooperation, and general willingness to answer questions.

"Take Horn to Detention Block C and have the guards follow the protocols we discussed," Rage continued. "I'll accompany Solo to Detention Block A myself."

If Han hadn't been looking right at Archimedes, he would have missed the way her mouth tightened and a muscle worked in her jaw. All she did, however, was nod her head with mechanical military precision. "As you wish, my lord."

Han watched her and a squad of stormtroopers begin to lead Hal away.

"Hey!" he called. "Hal! Don't do anything I wouldn't do!"

He had enough time to see Hal look over his shoulder and give him what was probably meant to be a fed-up look before he was gone.

* * *

For someone who actually _wanted_ to get captured, Melody seemed to take far too much pleasure in trying to kill stormtroopers. She took down two of them with her stolen blaster rifle before she was tackled, at which point she produced a vibroblade from somewhere and made a spirited attempt to stab everyone in arm's reach. It wasn't until one of the Imps managed to club her over the head that she subsided into mumbled incoherent profanity - and even then, despite the fact that there was blood running down the side of her face and she was having trouble focusing her eyes, she took the time to snarl in Ben's direction.

"Tell that one I'm coming for him next!" she snapped, followed by a string of slurred obscenities Ben had never heard from anyone except the Darklighter garage's scariest and most questionable customers. He reminded himself that it was just for show - or at least he hoped it was - and managed to push himself into a sitting position. Whatever Melody had done to him still made it hard to breathe.

"Easy there," someone said next to him. A stormtrooper completely indistinguishable from all the others crouched down next to Ben, who did his best not to recoil, and clapped him on the shoulder. "You all right?"

Ben made a wheezing noise that he hoped would be taken as an affirmative and took the opportunity to look around. Melody was being dragged off to the transport by what looked like half a battalion Imps and being threatened with stuncuffs by the sound of things. The rest of the stormtroopers were checking on their wounded or dead comrades - and on Miri, who lay in an unmoving heap where she had fallen. Beyond all that, near the exits, some of the people of Ludlii were starting to gather in quiet frightened clumps.

The Imp who had been checking on him gripped him by the arms and all but hauled him up to his feet, shifting his weight so Ben could stagger against his shoulder. "Think you can stand on your own?" he asked in an undertone.

Ben shrugged, hardly listening. He watched as the Imps retrieved emergency stretchers from somewhere on the transport and ordered the growing cluster of onlookers to stand back. A red-haired boy who might have been one of the brothers Miri had mentioned spotted her and let out a strangled yell, but was grabbed and pulled back into the anonymity of the crowd before the Imps could do more than turn in his general direction.

Ben wondered how many of the stormtroopers collecting their wounded had been part of what had happened at Draco's Well - if somewhere among them was the person who had killed Aunt Olivea. He wondered if it was the very one supporting his weight now, and then he tried not to because the thought made him feel sick.

"Captain!" the stormtrooper called. "He's wheezing and barely keeping himself on his feet. Permission to take him to the transport and get him patched up?"

Another seemingly-identical stormtrooper made a gesture that must have been some kind of yes, because the next thing Ben knew he was being half-led, half-carried to the transport. It still hurt to breathe. Talking - or communicating at all, really - was out of the question.

Which was why he had to frantically thump the helpful Imp's shoulder and gesture at the _Icarus_. That was the ship he was supposed to be on. The whole plan depended on it.

But the Imp just shook his head. "What about it? No one's getting on that thing until we figure out if it's booby-trapped or not." Before Ben could protest - or at least make a wheezing attempt at it - he was hauled up the ramp and into the transport and led to what turned out to be a very small bathroom tucked into a small alcove. Once inside, he was eased down so that he was sitting on the deck, his back propped up against the sink.

"Better?" the Imp asked.

Ben tried to answer. His voice dissolved into a coughing fit.

"Hey." The Imp tilted his helmet to one side in a way that Ben might have called concerned, at least if he hadn't been an Imp. "Take it easy. Breathe. You're damn lucky she didn't kill you."

He made a rasping noise that he hoped would be taken as agreement.

"Was anything else with her?"

Instead of trying to talk, he opted to wave his arms around to convey the rough height and shape of an astromech droid.

The Imp just snorted. "Never mind, I'll wait until you can talk. You might as well stay here until you get your breath back." He clapped Ben on the shoulder in much the same way Old Farstrider had back in Draco's Well, which only served to make Ben hate him a little and deeply miss home. "Sneak out and cover the rear hatch before we land. The captain won't notice."

Ben nodded and tried to cough in a thankful way. He wondered if Old Farstrider was still alive.

The Imp gave him one more thump on the shoulder before he left, leaving Ben completely alone for the first time since before his aunt had died.

And for the first time, he realized that he had no idea who the other dead settlers were.

He would have known them no matter what - neither Draco's Well nor Noon Ridge were big enough for strangers - but he didn't know which neighbors were gone, which familiar faces had vanished forever while he and Sasha hid at Hermit's Hut. Maybe they were the mothers Aunt Olivea liked to gossip with or the friends Sasha had dragged around in search of adventure and space battles. Maybe one of them was Old Farstrider's grandnephew Dev, who had tried to use to call Ben a space bastard in Sasha's presence and gotten a tooth punched out for his troubles. Maybe two of them were Keeto and Marr, the Rodian twins from the moisture farm out past Noon Ridge, who had been the only children even close to Ben's age when he was very young.

In some ways, it didn't matter. Even if the Emperor himself personally walked into the transport, Sasha and the crew of the _Icarus_ in tow, and announced that it had all been a giant misunderstanding, it wouldn't be the same.

That world - the quiet unassuming world that Ben had loved so much - was gone forever.

He had enough presence of mind to lock the bathroom door before he sat back down on the deck, took off his helmet, and squeezed his eyes shut.

 _Stop_ , he ordered himself. _Stop it and think_. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Right now he was the only person Sasha could count on, which meant he wasn't allowed to think about the hole in his heart where the safety of home was supposed to be. He was a practical person with things to do, he told himself. Practical people didn't sit in a hidden corner of an Imp transport, wearing a dead stormtrooper's armor and carrying a weapon they didn't really know how to use and feeling much younger than eighteen.

Sasha needed him. Captain Solo and his crew needed him. That was the beginning and end of everything that mattered at the moment. That was his new world for the moment.

He could do this.

Thought firmly in mind, he opened his eyes and really looked at where the Imp had put him.

It was...well, it was a bathroom. But it was a bathroom on a ship and it had a hatch in one wall, just big enough to fit a hand in and probably only there in case someone needed to rewire the light fixture.

That didn't matter. Machines weren't like people. They were logical, even the most shoddily-constructed ones, and the only difficult thing about unfamiliar machines was painstakingly drawing their maps of wires and pipes and circuits.

Or at least that was the difficult thing for most people.

Ben pried the cover off the hatch and stared at the tangle of wires for a long moment. Then he reached inside.

And just as every machine always had, the ship began to draw its map for him.

* * *

The walk to the detention block was silent, which was fine with Han. He was looking for escape routes again - an unguarded hangar bay door, a stormtrooper sleeping on the job, anything at all. But the _Retaliator_ was a well-built and well-run ship and the promising possibilities he saw were few and far between.

He expected to be left alone in his cell, but instead Rage dismissed the stormtrooper escort and followed him inside. Not entirely sure what to do, Han settled to sitting on the cell's bench with as little care and concern as he could convey, ready to fight or bolt if he had to.

Instead Rage just slumped against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. "You know you're going to be executed, don't you? I can't stop that."

"You mean you won't," Han shot back.

"I meant what I said." Rage's expression darkened. "I'm not Vader. I don't have the kind of power he did. There are limits to what I can do."

Han refused to dignify that with an answer. "Then why draw it out?" he asked instead. "Why not shoot me now and get it over with? We both know you've got no problem killing your old friends. You've got no problems trying to kill my _son_."

For a long moment Rage said nothing. He frowned down at the deck as if looking for answers there. "You've been hiding from the Empire for years, Han," he said at last. "You were mostly forgotten. Why risk everything now?"

"Dunno. Why'd I bother saving you on Hoth? Hell, why am I bothering to to talk to you now?" Han shrugged. "What can I say, kid? I make stupid decisions."

That got something that might have been a smile, come and gone before Han could be entirely sure. "I knew Leia and I picked it up from somewhere."

The very last thing he wanted was to talk about Leia. "Why're you here talking to me anyway?"

"I need to know where that message is," Rage said.

He knew there had been a reason for this little chat besides the galaxy's most painful nostalgia trip. "So you can give it back to that emperor of yours?"

"So I can see what he was so desperate to hide. Just because I don't believe in the Rebellion anymore doesn't mean I trust him any more than you do."

Han leaned forward, elbows propped on his knees. "Even if I knew - and I _don't_ \- what makes you think I trust _you_ enough to tell you?"

 _I'm not Leia_ , he didn't say. He didn't need to.

He had no idea what to make of the expression on Rage's face. Hell, he had no damn idea what to make of Rage at all. He had seen the things he had done firsthand, had heard stories of Anakin's narrow escapes, but he wasn't Vader, dark and horrible. It would have been easier if he had been - if there hadn't been traces of the farmboy Han had once thought of as something like a kid brother so plainly visible.

Rage's face hardened. "I'll be sending an interrogation squad later. Anything you tell them needs to be reported to the Emperor."

So would everything else, eventually. Even if Rage didn't intend it to. Han had absolutely no illusions about that.

"Then I guess we're done here," he said.

Rage curled his hands into fists and pushed off the wall. For a moment Han thought he was going to attack him, but all he did was turn and stalk out of the cell.

Maybe that was why Han couldn't resist one last parting shot. "Leia always thought you were on her side, you know."

Rage didn't turn around.

"So did I," he said, and the cell door slid shut between them.

* * *

The Naboo, fond as they were of curving graceful shapes and warm colors, had little time or patience for the blocky functional style so popular within the rest of the Empire. _Queen of Mercy_ was no exception, being a sleek silvery dart of a vessel registered as a diplomatic ship and built to look the part. It was armed to the teeth, of course - Lucéa had seen to that - but officially it was as unassuming and gentle as her people were supposed to be.

It was also most welcome after the general unpleasantness of Mustafar, so the second it had slipped past the planet's security scanners and leapt to hyperspace, she relocated to the communal area and made a sort of nest for herself in one of the chairs, practically cocooning herself in blankets and throws. It was extraordinarily tempting to sink into them and close her eyes - to forget her Jedi passenger and the questions he posed - but she resisted the urge and dug through a stack of datapads instead. While she might have officially been on holiday in the Lake Country and free from her government responsibilities, that was far from her only job.

Naboo's ruler and prime minister were chosen by the sector moff and a committee of Imperial loyalists, but the people were allowed to choose their own deputy prime minister. Lucéa had been elected when she was fourteen and had held the position ever since.

She had been a Rebel conspirator for much longer, of course - ever since her mother had taken her by the hand and quietly explained the importance of keeping secrets.

"Mistress Lucéa."

She looked up from the datapad to find herself presented with a cup of tea and a plate of sliced fruit from the _Queen of Mercy_ 's kitchen unit, courtesy of Anakin's droid. The old protocol unit had taken a particular liking to her, doubtless because she was far easier to understand than a Jedi fugitive.

"Thank you, Threepio," she said as she carefully set the tea and fruit next to the datapads. "Is Anakin in his cabin?"

"Master Anakin did not want to be disturbed," Threepio said in a tone that managed to convey concern and disapproval at the same time. "I believe he might be meditating."

Yes, that sounded like him. "He's overthinking, you mean."

"I'm afraid I'm not quite sure, Mistress Lucéa. He did seem rather less peaceful than usual."

Lucéa sighed and reluctantly extracted herself from her blanket cocoon. "I'll check on him."

The _Queen of Mercy_ only had a few cabins, but they were comfortable and well-appointed, never mind that Lucéa's hid secret communications equipment and a variety of blasters. Anakin's was next to hers. She opened the door without bothering to knock and found, as she had suspected, that he wasn't so much meditating as sprawled on top of his bed with his clothes and boots on, eyes half-closed, face pointed at the ceiling.

"You know," she said as she settled herself on one of the cabin's chairs, "when my mother and grandmother told me stories about the Jedi, they somehow neglected to mention their remarkable dead gundark imitations."

Anakin opened his eyes long enough to attempt to give her a serene and composed eyeroll. He very nearly succeeded.

"They also neglected to mention protocol droids," she continued. "Why does a Jedi need a protocol droid?"

He lifted his hand to tick points off his fingers. "First, I'm not really a Jedi. Second, why _wouldn't_ a Jedi need a protocol droid?"

"I like you better when you're being annoyingly cryptic about Force visions," Lucéa said. "Now answer the question."

"You're no fun at all," Anakin said amiably. "And he runs in the family. I inherited him from my mother."

She decided that was as good an opening as any. She liked Anakin, even if he could be murderously frustrating to understand, but sometimes stringing a conversation together was impossible. "I'm curious about your name," she said. "We have several resettled Alderaanians living in Theed. I was under the impression naming children after one's ancestors was a tradition."

"You want to know why I'm Anakin and not Bail."

Not precisely, but it was a start. "Yes, I suppose."

Anakin went silent. He peered up at the ceiling for a long time, his brow furrowed. Lucéa folded her hands in her lap and waited.

"If you wanted to send a message to someone," he said at last, "to the people of Naboo, what would you name your child?"

That wasn't the cryptic non-answer she had almost been expecting. "That might be a better question to ask my mother. She's actually done it."

Lucéa wasn't a Naboo name, although it had been hammered and shaped into something that almost fit. It wasn't even supposed to be a girl's name. It was taboo for Naboo parents to know the gender of their unborn child, but Lucéa had always suspected that her mother had expected a boy and had needed to make some quick last-minute adjustments.

She would never be able to prove it, but she was almost certain - _almost_ \- that had she actually been a boy, she would have been named Luke.

And didn't _that_ invite all kinds of questions?

But Anakin didn't know any of that. "I didn't ask about your mother," he said. "I asked about you."

Lucéa didn't make a face at him, because that wasn't the sort of thing deputy prime ministers and secret revolutionaries did. "I would name a boy Jafan," she said, remembering childhood stories of the legendary hero-king. "And I would name a girl Amidala."

"Why?"

"To remind my people that there is still strength in Naboo and that they are capable of resisting."

Anakin smiled in a particularly knowing and infuriating way.

This time she did frown at him. "You knew I was going to say something like that," she accused. "Why ask if you already knew the answer?"

"Because it's nice to hear my mother's logic coming from someone else."

"Your _mother_."

Anakin just grinned at her.

" _That's_ why your mother chose your name? To send a message?" She felt more than a little dumbfounded. Apparently Leia Organa had been even more confusing than her son. "Did it work?"

She wished she hadn't asked, because his expression sobered immediately.

Talking to Anakin was like walking through a minefield sometimes. Not because she might anger or offend him - whatever else he was, he was the calmest and most patient person she had ever met - but because the burdens her mother had entrusted to her were nothing compared to what had been placed on his shoulders.

"I don't suppose you would like some fruit?" she said, voice falsely bright. "Threepio's been in my kitchen unit again."

"I should probably give him to you," Anakin muttered. "I think he likes you better than me."

"Perhaps that's because I don't drag people to awful planets and lay around like a squashed mynock," she retorted.

She waited for Anakin to smile, but he didn't.

* * *

The Imp transport was halfway between Ludlii and the Star Destroyer when, without any warning whatsoever, every single light went out.

A cacophony of alarms went off, each louder and more annoying than the last, and the entire transport lurched violently. It shuddered once and then began to wobble back and forth, sending equipment and cursing stormtroopers careening from bulkhead to bulkhead.

Melody, more in less in one piece thanks to the bacta patch someone had halfheartedly slapped on her head and used to the _Icarus_ 's temperamental grav systems, braced herself in place instinctively. She made a grab the Imp next to her, hoping to somehow snatch the key to her binders, and then found herself gripping the edge of her seat as the entire transport lurched again and began to slowly roll over.

Everything was pitch-black and very loud. She could hear more curses, muffled orders, and then a crash and a horrific shriek of pain as someone slammed into the bulkhead hard enough to break bone. The Imp next to her was still hanging on, but he was just contributing to the chaos, shouting into the noise like everyone else.

"Uncuff me," Melody snapped at him.

The Imp stopped demanding to know what the hell was going on. "Shut up!" He sounded young and frightened instead of intimidating, so she decided to use that.

"I'm about to fall," she ground out through gritted teeth. The transport was starting to tilt drastically now, the front rising and the back sinking as if caught by Ludlii's gravity, and the only reason she hadn't tumbled down to join Artoo and most of the Imps was the fact that she had managed to hook an arm around what had once been the headrest. "I don't have armor or a helmet, fragface. I drop now, you get to explain to Rage that I smashed my head in and bled to death because your kriffing pilot can't fly!"

For a long, tense moment she thought he wasn't going to do it. Then he made an irritated noise and fumbled for her binders. A bit of inventive swearing later, they were tumbling down to what had become the floor of the transport and Melody had her hands blessedly free.

"Thanks!" she said brightly.

Then she hooked her arms around her makeshift handhold and used her legs to kick him loose from the seats.

In the chaos, the sound of one Imp hitting the floor harder than most went more or less unnoticed.

The ship had rotated past ninety degrees now and was starting to flip upside-down. Below her, an Imp who sounded more competent than the others was ordering everyone to brace themselves and telling whoever was trapped in the bathroom to try and kick the door down. The bulkheads shuddered as the gravitational controls struggled to reassert themselves and the alarms had reached a frantic fever pitch.

Moving by feel, Melody scrambled up the seats like a ladder, making her way toward what she hoped was the cockpit. "Artoo!" she bellowed, and then promptly ducked a blaster shot someone sent in her direction. "Whatever the hell you're doing, cut it out and get the kriffing cockpit door open!"

In answer, she got a chorus of muffled and mostly-indecipherable beeps. The general gist of it, though, seemed to be that he wasn't doing any of this on account of the restraining bolt and also being buried under a pile of unconscious and possibly dead Imps.

So this wasn't part of some brilliant droid escape attempt. Frag.

A gloved hand made a grab at her. Melody took advantage of the way the ship was rolling to push whoever it was in the general direction of the Imp pileup somewhere far below. She could hear the one she had mentally labeled as Competent Imp telling everyone else to forget the prisoner and get to the emergency controls, but judging by the hail of haphazard blaster bolts she had to dodge, no one was listening to him.

"Fragging threefaced whoreson of a - _would you stop that!_ " Melody glared down into the darkness. "I'm trying to get to the cockpit and right the ship, you sithspit wastes of space! I don't want to die any more than you do!"

Competent Imp was the one who answered her. "Where are you?"

"Halfway up the chairs and trying to use them as a ladder."

"Is there anyone up there with you?"

"If they are, they're not saying anything." She climbed up another chair. "Tell me how to get past the cockpit door."

"It only opens from the inside when we're transporting prisoners," a grumpier and more female-sounding Imp said. "Might be better to sit and wait until the _Retaliator_ notices we're behind schedule and comes for us."

Melody seriously considered trying to spit on her. "And how long's _that_ gonna take?"

"Can't be more than half a click," Competent Imp said, "but it's hard to tell with the emergency beacons out. It'll be faster if we can get those back online. We've got wounded down here."

She decided to ignore the part he left unsaid - namely, that it was Melody herself who had caused some of those wounds. Her arms were starting to cramp up. "Then one of you fragging geniuses turn them on."

"Emergency beacons are in the cockpit," Grumpy Imp said, because of course they were. It had probably been more efficient or cost-effective to put them there, and it wasn't as if the Imp desk jockey who had commissioned this thing would have cared about saving soldiers' lives. Stormtroopers were expendable and easily replaceable cogs in a machine. That was why Melody had planned to disguise herself as one.

She braced herself against the seats long enough to try to shake feeling back into her arm. "Is there _any_ other way in?" she called down into the darkness.

Grumpy Imp was the one who answered her. "Don't know. You might be able to hotwire the door, but it's going to take light and more time than we've -"

The ship lurched again. Melody barely had time to cling for dear life as something above her came loose in a shower of sparks and sailed past her. It hit somewhere far below, down in the depths of the pitch-black vertical mine shaft the transport had become, with a heavy metallic crash that turned into another scream.

Then she heard the hissing.

"Find my damn droid!" she yelled, failing to keep the growing panic out of her voice. "We don't have half a click! We're venting air!"

Competent Imp started barking orders below her. She blocked out the noises of the stormtroopers trying to jury-rig life support systems by feel and continued her scramble up the seats. The whole transport tilted further. If this kept up she was going to be hanging upside-down.

And then the damn settler kid's voice came out of nowhere, still hoarse from when she'd hit him in the throat. "Send the droid into the bathroom! I think we can access the cockpit controls from here!"

Melody cursed under her breath. What was he even doing on this ship? More to the point, what was he doing tinkering with cockpit controls in the fragging bathroom?

If this was his idea of stupid heroics, she was going to  _eviscerate_  him.

The ship seemed to have stopped, or at least more or less stabilized itself. She allowed herself one more muttered string of profanity before she climbed the last few chairs. That put her up against the bulkhead, trying to find the door controls by touch. It was already starting to get colder and harder to breathe, and she didn't have the equipment that the Imps did to protect herself if the ship suddenly decided explosive decompression was a great idea. "Artoo!" she snarled down into the darkness, smashing her hand against the bulkhead in a futile attempt to beat the controls into submission. "Cockpit! Now!"

And then, miracle of miracles, she heard the cockpit door slide open above her.

Melody let out a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding and heaved herself inside.

There was still some light, courtesy of Ludlii's distant sun shining through the viewport. It was enough to give her a good look at the fried short-circuited controls and what was left of the man strapped in beside them.

"The pilot's dead!" she called down through the door, which at this point was more like a bottomless black pit dug into the wall-turned-floor. "Electrocuted, looks like."

There was a flurry of dismayed sounds and swearing from down below before Competent Imp spoke up again, all business. "The beacons?"

"Everything's out but the repulsors. That should be enough to get us back to your Star Destroyer as long as you can keep us from breathing space," she added, then allowed herself a smirk. "But you're not gonna like the landing."

"We'll brace ourselves," Competent Imp said flatly.

Melody gave him a mocking salute he couldn't see anyway and then scrambled back to the ruined controls, pausing only to kick the pilot's body into a corner.

 _Oh well_ , she thought as she switched on the repulsors. _At least it's not Nar Shaddaa again._

With one last stomach-turning jolt, the transport began to lumber towards safety.


	11. Chapter 11

_"The Outer Rim's lawlessness and lack of central authority make it fertile ground for folklorists. In the Core children play at being T.I.E. aces, but at the distant edges of the known universe, where holoprojectors are rare and sanctioned galactic history is all but unknown, they still swing sticks like swords and proudly declare themselves heroes with no fear."_  
\- Jon-Win Grale, _Children's Tales in the Outer Rim_ , B'kath University Publishers, Ltd.

_"Friendly reminder that this year's peer evaluations need to be filled out with_ constructive _criticism (no swear words, please!) and submitted to your division's political officer by the end of the pay period."_  
\- Century Shipyards Engineering Department, Internal HR Transmission 92-801-35

 

**The Circle**  
**Chapter 11**

  
All things considered, it was a miracle that the crippled troop transport - leaking fuel and air and Force knew what else and far too fragile for any tractor beam to catch - didn't hit the _Retaliator_ 's hangar bay like a live bomb. In fact, all it did was skid across the deck and crash through a cluster of T.I.E.s no one had had time to move. The ensuing burst of heat and flames melted part of the comm relays and overloaded the fire suppression systems and was, generally speaking, a minor calamity in and of itself, but it was something that was well within the capacity of a disciplined Star Destroyer crew to handle.

And Rage's crew was nothing if not disciplined.

The two flight control towers were relatively undamaged. He had settled himself in one of them, flanked as always by Lieutenant Archimedes, and tried to remind himself that his crew was the best and most efficient at what they did and that he would do absolutely no good by barging into the hangar bay to rescue the soldiers and crew still trapped inside. When that didn't work, he folded his arms and peered through the clear plasticrete window at the haze of smoke that filled the hangar bay below, as if he could clear it with sheer willpower.

According to the rescue crews, the transport had come to rest upside-down at the far end of the hangar bay, where it had inconveniently entangled itself with a pair of T.I.E. bombers. Neither were armed, fortunately, but between the burning ship and the unstable fuel cells and poor internal shielding all T.I.E.s tended to have anyway, sending in medics without assessing the situation and fixing the fire suppression systems first was asking for disaster. One wrong move could blow a hole in the _Retaliator_.

Rage could sense the lives in the hangar bay, some of them flickering and faint. But there were very few of them - far fewer than the thousands that made up his whole crew. It wasn't a choice he wanted to make, but one he could make and had in fact made before. The survivors, however many there were, were just going to have to wait.

That didn't mean he was happy about it.

"How many people were on the transport?" he asked.

Lieutenant Archimedes looked up from her datapad. She seemed unconcerned about the fire, but then again, he hadn't seen her look truly worried about anything in almost twenty years. "Not counting the prisoner? The pilot and twenty-six stormtroopers."

"To escort one prisoner?"

"You did request that all precautions be taken, my lord. And this particular prisoner has a colorful history," she added as she held out the datapad.

Rage tore his gaze away from the hangar bay long enough to take it. He had far less interest in Han's gunner than he did in Han himself and in Corran Horn's son, but even a quick glance told him that said gunner - Melody, surname unknown, somewhere around eighteen standard years old, possibly but not definitely from Ord Mantell - had an impressive rap sheet: murder, kidnapping, arson, impersonation of Imperial personnel, gunrunning, armed robbery -

He looked up. "'Mynock smuggling'?"

"A very serious offensive on Nar Shaddaa, apparently."

"I don't see sabotage anywhere on here."

"With respect, my lord, we don't have confirmation that whatever happened to that transport wasn't mechanical failure - "

Rage used the datapad to point in the direction of the fiasco in the hangar bay.

" - but perhaps Captain Solo's gunner has expanded her horizons," Lieutenant Archimedes finished smoothly. "Or perhaps the astromech droid had something to do with it. One of those was apprehended as well."

"An R2 model?"

"A very old one, my lord. With dismantle-on-sight orders in half the Core."

Rage almost smiled at that. The whole galaxy and everything he thought he knew about it might have turned upside-down, but apparently Artoo was still Artoo. "Do we know what happened to the missing settler?" he asked as he skimmed through the rest of the datapad. Lieutenant Archimedes was obsessively thorough even when it he would have preferred her not to be, so he was forced to scroll through a comprehensive list of Melody the gunner's less notorious crimes, including "theft of sabacc table" and "assault with deadly weapon (pufferpig)".

"We're still attempting to ascertain whether or not he left Tatooine, my lord. In all likelihood he is in hiding on Ludlii somewhere. The squads still on the surface are currently searching for him."

"Make that your priority as soon as everyone is rescued." Rage stretched out with the Force, trying to get some sense of where the boy was. All he felt was the professionalism and determination of the repair and rescue teams working to get inside the hangar bay, and the anger and fear and confusion of the trapped stormtroopers and flight crews still inside.

And then, very suddenly, one of them flared up in a bright flash of puzzlement and surprise and recognition and _pain_ \- and was extinguished.

Rage handed the datapad back to Lieutenant Archimedes.

She gave him a look he had learned to recognize. "My lord," she said, following after him as he turned and quickly walked out of the tower. "Whatever you may feel you need to do, I'm sure the rescue teams are more than capable of - "

"Our prisoner is alive," he said. "And she has a weapon."

Lieutenant Archimedes didn't seem surprised or moved by this fact. "At least wait until we know the air is breathable," she said in a tone that perfectly straddled the line between detached professionalism and exasperation. "Think of the damage it would cause the Empire's reputation if you died of smoke inhalation."

Rage clenched his hands and resisted the urge to reach out and rip the protective seals off the hangar bay doors. "Of course. We can't have that."

If Lieutenant Archimedes noticed that he said this through gritted teeth, she chose not to comment.

* * *

For the third time in his life, Ben opened his eyes and found himself somewhere unfamiliar. In this case, it was flat on his back and looking up at a trio of stormtroopers.

He sat up very quickly and then immediately regretted it. Something inside his head felt like it had been shaken around, and between the suspicion that he had somehow bruised the inside of his skull, the distant klaxons, and the disconnect he got from looking through his helmet's viewports, he had to fight down a wave of dizziness and nausea.

"I think he's awake," someone - presumably one of the Imps - announced to the galaxy in general. His voice was hardly audible over the alarms.

A blaster rifle came into view, its barrel pointed right between Ben's eyes. The stormtrooper holding it looked battered, but otherwise appeared to be in the best shape of the three. Of the other two stormtroopers, one had an arm hanging at an awkward angle and the other was using some kind of support strut as a crutch.

"Where's everyone else?" Ben asked. His throat still hurt, but not as much as his head, so he supposed that was something.

"Dunno," the Imp with the crutch said. She sounded a little like one of the stormtroopers who had been trying to talk Melody into the transport's cockpit. "We were all by the aft exit when we crashed. Couldn't get to anyone else because of all the structural damage. We had to cut our way out with that toy of yours."

Belatedly, Ben realized that she was holding the lightsaber from Hermit's Hut in the hand that wasn't clutching her makeshift crutch. He also realized that they weren't on the transport, or even in a hangar bay for that matter. Instead of bulkheads, what was visible behind the Imps was something that looked like the sort of soft reflective tarp that came standard in survival kits. The Darklighter garage had always had extras and Aunt Olivea had spread them on the roof and used them to dry sunfruit rinds and h'kak beans. This one seemed to be something more like a prefab pop-up shelter and was presumably doing its job; whatever was causing the burning fuel smell that even the filters in Ben's helmet couldn't entirely keep out, the air was still mostly clear.

He swallowed back the question he wanted to ask next - _but is everyone else going to be okay_ \- because it was stupid and pointless. If the Imps had needed to cut themselves free of the transport, then of course everyone wasn't okay. Everyone else was probably dead, Melody included, and he was on his own.

"So what are you?" the Imp with the crutches was saying. "Donner here thinks you're an inquisitor, because of the lightsaber."

Ben shook his head and winced at the spike of pain. "Whatever that is, I'm not it."

"Uh huh." The Imp sounded unconvinced. "And Kell over there - the one with the broken arm - she thinks you're some kind of Rebel."

"I'm _not_ ," Ben protested, and tried not to think about the hidden datachip and the mysterious message that had started all of this.

The Imp shifted her weight back over to her crutch and rested the hand holding the lightsaber on her hip. "Me? I just want to know how you managed to bring down a whole transport from the damn bathroom."

He tried to ignore the sour churning guilt in his stomach. "Is anyone else still alive?"

"I just told you, kid," the Imp said with a sigh. "We couldn't get to anyone. I don't know."

She sounded more tired than intimidating, and maybe why that was why he answered more or less honestly. "I wasn't trying to damage the transport," he said. "Not like that. I just wanted the lights to switch off during the landing cycle."

"And you were doing that _because_ …"

"Because I don't know what stormtroopers are supposed to do," Ben admitted, "and I wanted to get off the transport without getting shot."

The Imp pointing the blaster rifle at him made a disgusted noise. "Sounds like he's a Rebel to me, Cap."

"Then he's not a very good one," the Imp with the crutch - Cap - muttered under her breath, just loud enough for Ben to hear. Louder, she said, "So what were you doing on the transport and where did you come by the armor?"

Ben had no answer for that - at least not one that wouldn't get him and Sasha both in a lot of trouble - but he was saved from having to come up with a plausible lie when the soft plastic wall of the shelter suddenly crumpled inward. Waves of black smoke rolled in, accompanied by a fast-moving shape that slammed into the Imp holding the blaster rifle. By the time Ben managed to get to his feet, the Imp had dropped to the deck with a horrible gurgling noise.

There were the sounds of a struggle out in the swirling smoke. Ben froze, torn between ducking back down or running out into the smoke, only to have the decision made for him when a heavy weight slammed into him and knocked him to one knee. There was a moment of slow creeping terror as he realized it was one of the Imps and that they weren't moving, something had killed them and it was a _body_  weighing him down - and then he was frantically pushing the dead Imp away and scrambling back upright.

Only to find himself watching the indistinct shape of the mysterious attacker kick the last Imp's crutch out of her grasp and send her tumbling down.

Without even thinking about what he was doing - without thinking at all - Ben dove in front of her with his arms spread out like a shield. " _Don't!_ "

The attacker checked their swing and let out a string of profanity that was becoming all too familiar.

It was Melody.

Up close, he could see that she was wearing the sort of clunky black emergency mask that came stashed under every cockpit seat in the galaxy and had a bandaged slapped over her head. Instead of a blaster, she was holding a knife in one hand and what looked like a shard of cockpit viewport in the other. Both weapons had something dark on them that Ben decided didn't need to be examined too closely.

"Would you fragging _move?_ " she snapped.

Ben, not quite sure what he was doing protecting a the injured stormtrooper or why he had decided this was a good idea in the first place, just shook his head.

"She's an Imp, you idiot!"

"I know she's an Imp!" he protested. "Just because people are Imps doesn't mean you have to go around sticking knives in them!"

Melody stared at him. "Are you kidding me?"

He shook his head again and didn't move.

"What did you think we came here to do, have a nice picnic with them?" When Ben still didn't move, she tucked the knife into her belt and chucked the shard of viewport onto the deck. "Fine," she muttered. "You deal with her. See how long you last before you get shot. I'll be saving Hal if you need me."

Then she turned and stormed out, and Ben was left alone with the Imp.

He clenched his hands into fists to stop them from shaking. He couldn't do the same thing with his voice, though, and it came out far less steady than he would have liked. "Is she right? Are you going to shoot me?"

"Wasn't going to, kid." The Imp's voice was much steadier than his - much calmer and matter-of-fact than he would ever be able to manage if he had just seen people he knew die in front of him. "That's a fuel fire out there. A blaster bolt would set it all off and blow a hole in the ship."

And Melody probably knew that, he realized. That was why she had resorted to stabbing everyone in the first place.

"Can I have the lightsaber back?" he asked.

The Imp held it out.

He waited for a second, just in case it was a trick, and then quickly snatched it back before she could change her mind. It was a solid weight in his hand, the only proof he had of Tatooine until he got Sasha back.

"Kid," the Imp said suddenly, drawing his attention. She was holding a hand over her neck, right under her helmet, and the white armor of her glove had red smears on it. "Not that I don't appreciate it, but why'd you save me?"

Ben wished he had a good answer for that, but he didn't, so he settled for shrugging.

"I hope everyone else is okay," he said.

Before the Imp could ask what that had to do with anything - or remember that he was a stowaway with stolen stormtrooper armor and try to beat him to death with her crutch - he turned and hurried out of the shelter.

In the hangar bay it was dark and warm, and but for the acrid smell of burning fuel, it was like walking into the heart of a sandstorm. Ben had the strange disorientating sensation that he hadn't left Tatooine at all - that there wasn't a Star Destroyer's deck under his booted feet, that he wasn't wearing a dead stormtrooper's secondhand armor and didn't have a lightsaber clipped to his belt, that he wasn't seeing everything through a helmet. What suddenly seemed far more real were the memories of all the times he had huddled in the safety of his home in Draco's Well and listened to the howling wind outside. Dune Sea sandstorms were like great living beasts, swift and impossibly powerful or broad and all-consuming, and it was only the very brave or very foolish who ventured out into them.

Ben was neither of those things and knew he never would be. As far as he was concerned, the only reason to go out into any kind of sandstorm, much less a Dune Sea monster, was to save lives.

Which was what he was trying to do, he thought as he spotted the shape of Melody in the smoke and stumbled after her. The nature of the storm and the danger it presented were just very different.

The air was starting to clear a little - perhaps because he was being led away from whatever was burning, perhaps because someone had repaired the fire suppression systems. He could see Melody more clearly now, a blurry outline holding her knife at ready and moving with the quiet deadly grace of a krayt dragon. There was no other sound but the fitful, staticky wail of klaxons coming through damaged speakers. It seemed to Ben that the smoke had swallowed up everything else in the universe.

"I caught an Imp wandering around while I was looking for you," Melody muttered under her breath as he caught up with her, and suddenly the spell was broken and Ben was keenly aware that he was in a hangar bay and it was on fire. "Stashed his body and his blaster over by the storage lockers. He's pretty small, so the armor should fit."

Ben forced himself to look ahead instead of staring at her. "Why are you so good at killing Imps?"

"Give it time and a couple more dead relatives. You'll get the hang of it."

She said this as if it were the most natural thing in the galaxy, and Ben was about to point out that Aunt Olivea would not have wanted him to start stabbing random stormtroopers with sharp objects when his breath began to freeze in his lungs. Without quite realizing what he was doing, he stopped dead and spun around, the air crystallizing him his lungs. Ice trickled down his spine and settled deep in his bones.

"There's someone here," he whispered.

He couldn't see Melody now, but he heard her move and then felt her back pressed against his. "Where?"

"I don't know." He peered through the smoke, but there was nothing - no movement, no sound but the klaxons, nothing at all. "It's cold," he said at last.

Rather than grumbling at him, Melody seemed to tense up even more. She was suddenly all business, as calm and professional as any soldier. "We need to move."

"But - " Ben began.

And then he saw it.

The smoke spun on its own, gentle ripples and eddies like sand kicked up by a breeze. There was a sound of scraping metal and something fiery-hot flared into existence somewhere in the darkness. It quickly solidified into the great hulking shape of a T.I.E. fighter burning like a torch. It moved slowly and serenely and without a sound as it passed not twenty paces from where he and Melody stood, a flame-wreathed apparition that didn't so much fly under its own power as glide in silence across the hangar bay.

Ben stared, transfixed by the sight of it, and might have remained that way forever if the smoke hadn't swirled in the T.I.E.'s wake for a split second. It wasn't long, but it was enough for him to see an assembled medical team with gas masks and first aid kits and folded stretchers. His attention caught on a man standing in the middle of them - someone who looked a little like a junior Imp officer in his plain black uniform. His eyes were closed and one hand was outstretched, and his head was bowed in concentration.

_Rage_ , Ben thought as his heart stuttered against his ribs like a frightened animal battering the bars of its cage. He wasn't even sure how he knew.

"We need to go," Melody hissed. She grabbed him bodily and spun him around, so that he could see the way her eyes were wide frightened circles, utterly at odds with the fury in her voice. "We need to go _now_."

Ben had never been so quick to obey anyone in his life.

* * *

Like everything else, the _Retaliator_ 's medical bay was state of the art. It was also larger than Imperial regulations strictly required - which was just as well, since every one of its beds was occupied and its medics were running back and forth to treat burns, smoke inhalation, broken limbs, and all the other things that came with being in a horrific crash. One particular bed was reserved for the stormtrooper who had been rescued from an emergency shelter with a stab wound and a broken leg, and that was the particular patient Rage was making his way to.

"My lord," Lieutenant Archimedes was saying, "with all due respect, rescue teams and emergency equipment exist for a reason." Her voice was low and level and perfectly respectful, but the fact that she looked like a general about to throw her troops into the line of fire suggested how upset she actually was. "You know I have only the utmost admiration for your abilities, but surely you can see how moving a ship across a hangar bay might not be the wisest use of them."

Rage stepped aside to allow a pair of medics to hurry past. "Lieutenant," he said as a warning.

She ignored him. She always did when this sort of thing happened. "Perhaps my lord is unaware of the volatility of fighter fuel cells? Or what would become of this ship and its crew if you left it at the mercy of Core bureaucracy by accidentally dropped a T.I.E. fighter on yourself?"

" _Lieutenant_."

This time she subsided, after a fashion. He could still feel the indignation boiling off of her, all the things she wasn't saying - what about his special orders, what about the mission he had burdened her with all those years ago? Something about the set of her shoulders informed the galaxy in general that she was disappointed in him.

That was fine. He very much doubted it would be the last time.

The surviving stormtrooper had been tucked into a quieter corner of the medical bay, with dividers that offered some measure of privacy. Lieutenant Archimedes dutifully closed them as Rage examined the woman. She was human, perhaps forty years old, with black buzzcut hair and a tough, lined face - the sort of cut-from-a-mold career soldier one found in the rundown veterans' settlements the moffs like to establish in the least hospitable corners of the Outer Rim. When she saw Rage, she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders as if trying to stand at attention.

"At ease," Rage said, and she immediately collapsed back onto the bed. "What's your name?"

"TK-421."

"Your _name_."

"Trooper Varu Grath, sir."

It wasn't a name he recognized, but all that meant was that she hadn't required commendation or punishment significant enough to be brought to his attention. "You're the ranking survivor, Trooper Grath."

"I figured as much, sir. The landing was rough. I expect you'll be wanting a report on what happened."

"You can submit something official later. I just want to hear what you have to say."

She nodded once, just as crisp and curt as Lieutenant Archimedes at her most professional. "Right away, sir."

Rage listened as she recounted what had happened on the transport between Ludlii and the _Retaliator_. Like many older stormtroopers, she was good at giving a report without embellishments or speculation, and he didn't feel the need to interrupt her until she began to describe the mysterious intruder with the lightsaber.

He held up his hand to stop her. "Do you think he's a Jedi?" he asked, remembering the foreboding he had felt through the Force earlier - the surety that somehow, in some way, this all came back to Leia and everything she and the mythology built around her had come to represent.

Trooper Grath just shook her head. "No, sir. I'd bet money he wasn't. He didn't move like one."

"But he did have a lightsaber."

"Yes, sir." She shrugged a shoulder and then winced and seemed to wish she hadn't. "If I had to guess, I would say he's the missing fugitive from Tatooine. He's got the accent for it."

Rage glanced at Lieutenant Archimedes, who was already making a note on her datapad. "We'll need to debrief you as soon as possible. Did you see his face?"

"Couldn't take off his helmet, sir. Not with the air as bad as it was in the hangar bay. I figured you'd want him alive."

Her expression darkened at this, turning inward in some way Rage couldn't recognize. "You were right," he said.

That just made her mouth twist up in a grimace. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

"I don't punish people for speaking their minds, Trooper."

It still took her a moment to continue. "I was with the 117th at Hardhall and Kapana Bay, back when we were trying to clear out Organa's Jedi. I know how they move, sir, and that kid's as much of a Jedi as I am. If he's had any kind of training, I don't think it stuck. He's no threat to anybody."

Rage watched the indecision flash across her face. "You're not telling me something."

"He saved my life. I don't know why and I'm not sure he does either, but he could have let me die and he didn't." She met his eyes. "And the truth is, sir, I'm starting to regret saving his."

Beside him, he felt more than saw Lieutenant Archimedes go very still. "Meaning?" he asked.

Trooper Grath pushed herself up on the bed, even though strain was making her arms shake. "When you catch that kid," she said, "just put him in front of a firing squad. It'll be kinder."

"Kinder than _what?_ "

But he already knew. So did Lieutenant Archimedes, dutifully following the first order he had given her almost two decades ago.

And so, it seemed, did Trooper Grath, who still didn't look away from him.

"Then what happens to the ones who get taken alive, sir."

* * *

Wandering around a Star Destroyer unnoticed turned out to be easier than Ben had expected, even though he had no idea what he was doing. Melody seemed to acquire an air of authority the second she put on her stolen stormtrooper armor, and she marched through the corridors like she owned the whole ship, turning smartly at corners and standing at attention while she waited for the lifts. Ben did his best to copy her - and, more importantly, tried not to run into other stormtroopers, passing droids, or the occasional bulkhead.

"How do you know where we're going?" he grumbled under his breath when they briefly found themselves alone in a corridor. "I can't see a thing in this helmet."

Melody smacked him with the butt of her blaster rifle, hard. He decided to keep his thoughts to himself after that.

Or at least he did until he saw what their intended hiding place was. It was small and cramped, little more than a closet with a tiny bank of consoles, and apparently not important enough to bother about temperature regulation, given that it was very hot and the air was sticky and humid in a way that even Tatooine never quite managed. According to the sign on the door, it was Waste Disposal Station Six.

"Really?" he asked the second the door slid shut behind them.

In response, Melody ripped off her helmet and hit him with the butt of her rifle again, hard enough to send him crashing into a bulkhead.

"What the fragging hell were you _thinking?_ " she snarled. "You weren't even supposed to be on that transport, you idiot!"

Ben pushed himself off the bulkhead and pulled off his own helmet, grateful to no longer have to deal with the stale smell and the limited field of vision. He took the opportunity to glare at Melody. "They wouldn't let me on the _Icarus_. What was I supposed to do?"

"Something besides sabotaging the fragging transport!"

"I wasn't trying to sabotage the transport!" he yelled back, and then immediately lowered his voice. The last thing he wanted to do was make it this far just to get discovered because he couldn't keep quiet. "I _wasn't_ ," he repeated. "I wanted the lights to switch off during the landing cycle so I could sneak out of the bathroom and get off the ship. I don't how to pretend to be an Imp, remember?"

"And how did you get from switching off the lights to blowing everything up?"

"I _didn't_. Whoever built that transport rigged everything back into the power conduits and set up some kind of feedback loop. The only reason we didn't explode is because I caught it in time."

Melody rolled her eyes at him. "So...what? The Imps sabotaged their own ship? Someone at the dockyards has a grudge?"

"I don't know." Ben remembered the darkness and the sound of bodies hitting the bulkheads as the transport tilted sideways and felt sick all over again. "I should have noticed something wasn't right, but I've never seen anything wired like that before."

Instead of the snappy and undoubtedly profane answer he was expecting, Melody gave him the same sort of considering look Uncle Gavin gave a new shipment of spare parts. "Think you can do something like that to this ship? Not enough to cripple anything," she added when Ben opened his mouth to object, "but enough to cause a distraction?"

He considered this. Whoever had built the troop transport - and then hopefully been banned from coming within a parsec of any shipyard ever again - hadn't made the sort of serious mistakes that would have been noticeable during routine maintenance. Although he felt uneasy thinking about it, the strange wiring had been so subtly and carefully wrong that in retrospect, it did almost seem deliberate.

And anything that someone else had done to a machine, Ben was almost certain he could replicate.

"Maybe," he said at last. "I know a little about how Imp stuff, but I don't know how a Star Destroyer's put together."

"And you know about Imp stuff how?"

"My family ran a garage. Imp speeder bikes get stolen, too."

"This is a little bigger than a speeder bike," she muttered. At Ben's exasperated look, she sighed and added, "Guess it wouldn't hurt to try. See if you can get in touch with Artoo."

He blinked at her. "Huh?"

"Artoo? Useless droid, about this big? He's got your other comlink. I gave it to him before we had to switch uniforms."

"Oh," he said, and quickly switched his on. "Artoo?"

After a minute of silence, he was rewarded with a stream of irritated beeping.

Melody snatched the comlink out of his hand. "Where are you, you overgrown pile of scrap? No, wait," she added hastily when a storm of whistles and beeps erupted from the comlink, "shut up, it's not like I can understand a word you're saying anyway. Can you get to a dataport?"

The beep was short and affirmative this time.

"We're in Waste Disposal Section Six. We need this ship's schematics. Think you can do that?"

This time the beeping was steady and constant and put Ben in mind of old Padreic muttering mild profanities under his breath. Melody seemed reassured by this, though, and slouched against the bank of consoles as if she were waiting for something to happen. Soon enough, an extremely complex-looking schematic popped up on one of the screens.

Ben felt himself going cross-eyed just looking at it. He shook his head after a few seconds, giving up. "This isn't going to help me. I don't understand it."

"It's a schematic, fragface. I thought this is what you do for a living."

"I don't know where to begin with this."

Melody scrubbed her hands down her face and rolled her eyes up towards the ceiling as if begging some deity for patience. "I thought you were a kriffing mechanic."

"I am," Ben retorted more testily than he had meant to, "but there aren't any schools in Draco's Well, and even if there were, they wouldn't have...whatever this is." He waved his hand at the schematic, which continued to look as incomprehensible as ever. "I need to see the ship. I can't just do this from a picture."

Melody muttered something in Huttese. "It's some kind of stupid Force thing, isn't it." It wasn't even remotely a question.

Ben gave her the same look he gave Sasha every time she talked about running away and starting her own crime-fighting swoop gang. "Do you want me to do this or not?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Do you have a better idea?" he grumbled back.

She stepped away from the consoles, leaving Ben room to rest his hands on them. He ran a palm across them the same way other people might soothe a pet bantha, then crouched down in front of it and pried the access panels off, leaving the wires and circuits and guts exposed.

This wasn't the same as the troop transport. He could do this. He  _could_.

At first it felt as though the Star Destroyer was laid out much as the transport had been - as every single piece of Imp technology he had ever come across had been, except a thousand times larger. It seemed normal enough on the surface, but when he peeled back those top layers and went deeper into the core of it, he could feel something strange and sickly running through it, like a disease. The sticky wrongness of it threaded its way through the power conduits and artillery batteries, twisted itself into an invisible chokehold around the command consoles, and then snaked its way into the bowels of the ship before reaching out somewhere far beyond it, deep into the vastness of space.

Ben followed it out of the ship and into the emptiness beyond.

It was like being caught in a web. The wrongness entangled with the Star Destroyer spoked off in all directions. There were dozens of strands - hundreds, thousands, far too many for him to count - and every single one of them emerged from a roiling core that tugged at him like a black hole.

_Go back, boy._

Ben froze. There was something looming between him and the black core, a strange dark shape with a long cape and a blood-red blade.

_Go back. Now._

It held out one hand and _pushed_.

Ben snapped his eyes open and frowned down at the tangles of wires, not sure why he felt as uneasy as he did. "This ship has the same problem as the transport," he said.

"So can you recreate your little stunt or not?" Melody asked.

He sat back on his heels, only listening to her with half an ear. His attention was still on the way the innards of the Star Destroyer looped back in on themselves in strange and complicated ways, a great coiled trap waiting to be sprung. "I don't think I need to. It's already there."

"What does that mean?" Melody squatted beside him, hands resting on her knees, and peered at the wires as if waiting for them to do something interesting.

"It means that if I wanted to," Ben said, and felt ice in his blood, "I could blow up the whole ship. So could anyone else who knew what to do."

She looked at him with her big serious eyes, and for some reason all Ben could imagine was her reaching out with her knife and slicing a hole in the Star Destroyer. The oily darkness coiling around her was stronger and more unsettling here than it had been on Ludlii or Tatooine; he wondered if she was considering their lives - his and hers, Captain Solo's, Hal's, even Sasha's - and weighing them against the prospect of cutting the belly of the ship open and watching air and men leak out.

"I can work around it," he said. "If you tell me where Sasha and the others are, I can set off the some of the emergency alarms. That would trick them into evacuating the whole area."

Melody flashed him a toothy grin. "That's a start. Glad to know you're not totally useless."

Ben made a face at her and focused on the wiring and the circuits, and as he did he tried to ignore the sudden crystal-clear feeling that Melody - not Rage, not stormtroopers, not this whole stupid catastrophe of a rescue mission - was going to be the death of him.

* * *

The chair was a sterile, metallic gray. It was the same color as the cuffs that had been fastened around Sasha's wrists, and it was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked. The small room that held it and the equally metallic desk had gray walls and a gray floor. The stormtrooper who had shoved Sasha into the chair and retreated to guard the door had clean white armor, not at all like the Imps she had seen on Tatooine.

In the holodramas it wasn't like this. None of the heros and heroines were ever left to sit quiet and alone, feeling like the only bit of color left in the universe.

When the door slid open a few minutes later, she almost jumped out of her skin. Instead she kept herself flat against the back of the chair and tried to push pictures of torture droids out of her mind. It was almost a relief when the person who came into view and sat across from her at the polished black table turned out to be alone and unarmed, no knives or needles in sight.

Then she realized who he was.

"We need to talk about you and your brother," Darth Rage said without preamble.

Sasha pushed her fingernails in her palms in an effort not to hyperventilate. She didn't try to correct him, though. "What about us?"

"Your names would be a good start."

She wondered if he already knew and was just asking her to test her. "I'm Sasha Darklighter," she said anyway, because she wasn't the important one and it didn't matter what the Empire found about her - because watching her parents get scammed into buying shoddy broken vaporator parts had taught her every good lie was mostly truth with a bit of falsehood sprinkled on top. "My brother's Dev Darklighter."

"Your parents?"

"Gavin Darklighter and Olivea Newsuns." Her voice hitched as she said her mother's name. She tried to hide it by glaring harder than before.

If Rage noticed, he didn't give any indication. "Anyone else?"

"We've got a great-aunt somewhere, but I hardly know her because she doesn't like Dad."

"Are any of you part of the Rebellion?"

"Cousin Biggs, maybe, but he died when my dad was still a kid. We're just settlers."

Rage expression suggested he didn't entirely believe her. "Why were you and your brother hiding from the stormtroopers?"

"We weren't," Sasha snapped before she could think better of it. "The stupid vaporator wasn't working and we can't pay back any of our loans without it. Dev can do anything with machines, so he thought maybe he could fix it. That's why we ran," she added, trying to get her voice back under control. "We thought you were slavers. Do you know what happens to people who borrow credits from the Hutts and can't pay them back?"

Rage said nothing. His face was blank.

"There's no comm or anything in the landspeeder, so we couldn't warn anybody. Dev made us hide at Hermit's Hut - Old Kenobi's place."

"I've heard of it," Rage said shortly.

"Everybody has. Nobody goes there, though - even the Jawas won't touch it - so we went there to hide. The lightsaber was there, and it's stupid to leave something useful sitting around, so we kept it. After a while the odd-jobs-man found us and told us what happened to Mom, and he said it would be a good idea to get off of Tatooine so we didn't get shot. And we wound up here because Captain Solo did a blind jump to get us away from the tractor beams."

"And now your brother is somewhere on Ludlii."

Sasha bit her lip and cursed herself for telling as much as she had. "I don't know where he is."

"There's something you're not telling me about him."

"Dev?"

Rage nodded.

Unbidden, memories of Padreic's warnings came back to her, right on the heels of her own suspicions about Ben and his mysterious long-gone father. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. "No, there isn't," she lied.

Rage looked at her in a way that - for one long horrible moment - reminded her of her cousin at his most exasperated. "You're not too young to be sent to Kessel, you know."

Sasha wondered if her dad was still alive - and if he was, if he would ever find out what had become of her and Ben. Maybe they would become another Dune Sea mystery to be whispered over.

She tried to remember if thirteen was old enough to be shot for treason.

"There's nothing to tell you," she whispered.

She was saved from Rage's answer when a comm beeped. He sighed as he activated it. "I hope this is important."

"My lord," came a crisp and slightly nervous voice. "We have a massive power surge in Sector 6."

Rage's brow furrowed. He didn't take his eyes off Sasha. "Define 'massive'."

"It's centered around the detention blocks, my lord."

"I'm on my way," Rage said. He switched off the comm with the press of a button and folded his hands in front of him. The entire time, he kept looking at Sasha.

She dropped her gaze first.

"Your brother has something to do with this." The way Rage said it made it sound like a certainty.

Sasha didn't look up from her lap, in case Rage could read the emotions that were surely flitting across her face. Because there was no reason to think Ben was even on the Star Destroyer - there was no reason to think this wasn't some kind of glitch, or that Captain Solo wasn't doing what he did best in her father's stories and staging another dramatic escape.

But she was certain in a way that went down to her bones. Ben didn't do flashy things like other Darklighters - he didn't run away and join rebellions and get himself shot down in the trenches of Death Stars, didn't die flying next to the man who would turn around betray the Rebel Alliance just a few years later, and he certainly didn't knock another kid's teeth out for insulting his family - but he was patient and stubborn and did what he thought needed to be done, other people's opinions be damned.

Sometimes that meant dragging an angry, frightened cousin away from Draco's Well and hiding with her in an abandoned hut. Sometimes, apparently, it involved doing something really spectacularly heroically _stupid_.

Sasha lifted her head and looked Rage in the eyes. Despite the danger she was in, she grinned so hard her face hurt. _My family's stronger than your whole Empire_ , she thought, and she felt prouder and braver than she ever had before.

"I told you he's good with machines," she said.


	12. Chapter 12

_"Calrissian Shipping is less a company and more a collection of backroom dealings and dubious accounting practices held together by grandiose self-promotion. How it remains the Empire's primary Mid-Rim subcontractor is a mystery of Imperial bureaucracy."_  
\- Kenda Krath, _Core Values & Rim Entrepreneurs_, Hethgar Systems Central Press

_"We would not stand for the barbarity of executions in the Core. Here in the bright center of the universe, those who question the Empire merely disappear in the middle of the night, and anyone with a sense of self-preservation forgets they existed in the first place."  
_ \- Anatalio Brigants,  _Level 3035_ , Sallax and Sons Ltd. (banned: Imperial Board of Culture)

 

* * *

 

Despite not having any interest whatsoever in adventure holodramas, Ben had more than a passing familiarity with them. It was a side effect of growing up with Sasha. He knew, for example, that at some point in any given story, the Star Destroyer or medical base or other Imperial Navy installation in question tended to find itself in a the middle of a crisis, and that said crisis involved a lot of blaring alarms and shouting and people who weren't the heroes running in all directions and generally getting in each other's way.

He had always thought this was an unrealistic and very disorganized way to run a ship. Sasha had told him to _shut up_ already, he was ruining the best part.

As it turned out, however, there really _was_ a lot of noise and running and sirens. The difference was that the running was purposeful and no one was panicking or screaming - and, of course, if this had been a holodrama, he and Melody would have been the bad guys.

The advantage to this controlled chaos was that the two of them were just another pair of busy stormtroopers. If they ran quickly enough, everyone seemed to assume they knew what they were doing and got out of their way. The fact that they might be escaped prisoners or something similar didn't seem to cross anyone's mind. Ben was starting to wonder if this was because living and working inside something larger than Mos Espa meant that when a big crisis came up, all of the smaller crises became someone else's problem.

Or possibly everyone was preoccupied by the fact that he had convinced the Star Destroyer's safety systems that one of its detention blocks was about to explode. That might have had something to do with it.

"Let me know if you ever need a job," Melody muttered when the two of them paused to take a breather in a turbolift. Since it was heading towards Ben's imaginary disaster instead of away from it, they had it to themselves. "You would've been fragging useful on Nar Shaddaa." She sounded far too cheerful about the whole situation.

Ben stared at the turbolift doors and decided not to comment.

Melody was examining her blaster rifle, helmeted head cocked to one side. "When the shooting starts, you aim for the cameras, got that? No reason to have our faces all over the Holonet any more than they already are."

"No one can see our faces," Ben pointed out. "We're wearing helmets."

She looked up at him in a way that made him sure she was rolling her eyes. "Killjoy," she muttered as the doors slid open.

The detention bay was stark, spare, and almost empty. There were only two officers in plain uniforms and a pair of stormtroopers. "What are you doing here?" one of the officers said as he came around from behind a bank of consoles. He looked tense and pale and frightened and exactly like someone who thought he was standing on a ticking time bomb. "Evacuate this section immediately. Can't you hear the alarms?"

Melody shot him.

There was a split second of total silence while the other Imps stared at her. Then, very suddenly, all hell broke loose.

It didn't last very long. Ben had no more than a brief impression of blaster bolts flying past his eyes and of Melody, quick and graceful as a dancer, spinning to catch first one stormtrooper, then the other with shots right to the middle of their chests. The other officer had the sense to duck behind a console, but before he could do much more than draw his blaster, Melody had pulled her knife from somewhere and half-vaulted, half-rolled over the controls to stab him in the neck.

"Cameras!" she barked at Ben.

He jerked out of his frozen stupor and took aim at the cameras lining the walls. His hands were shaking and he was hardly a good shot to begin with, but after a few misfires he managed to take them out. In a way he was almost glad for the job to do. Between the alarms and his blaster, he didn't have to think about the sounds that last dying officer had made.

By now the entire detention bay was filled with the acrid smoke and sharp stench of burning circuitry. Melody yanked off her helmet, coughing a little at the smell, and began scanning the controls. "Artoo," she called into her comlink, "I need a manifest of all the prisoners here."

One of the consoles began to beep and flash. Ben focused on it instead of the bodies on the floor. "Someone's comming us."

"So keep them busy, genius."

"How?"

His answer was an eyeroll and a shrug.

No help there. Ben took a deep breath and tried to remember how Imps talked in Sasha's holodramas. Heroically, he was pretty sure.

"Um," he said as he switched the comm on. "Hi?"

Whoever was on the other end obviously didn't think he sounded very heroic, because there was a bit of sputtering on the other end of the comm before whoever it was rallied. "What's the situation down there?"

"Uh." Ben glanced down at one of the dead Imps and then wished he hadn't. "A camera exploded?" He decided that sounded like as good a lie as any. Melody was giving him an incredulous look, so he quickly amended this. "But just a small camera. It's nothing serious."

There was more sputtering, then the voice tried again. "Nothing serious? Who _is_ this? What's your operating number?"

Melody saved him from having to answer by pushing him away from the comm and leaning over it herself, her lips curved into a big unpleasant smile. "Hello there!" she chirped. "You know that transport you've got burning in your hangar bay? I'm with the man who crashed it. He's a little trigger-happy, so he's gone ahead and rigged the whole detention block to flash-fry anyone who comes through the turbolifts."

"I have?" Ben whispered, earning himself a kick in the shin.

"So if you want to avoid a whole lot of dead Imps," Melody continued without missing a beat, "you're going to back off and let us get our friends off this bucket of bolts. You got all that?" She switched off the comm before the Imp on the other end could answer and turned to Ben. "The prisoners aren't listed by name, but Artoo's got two cell numbers for us to try. They're probably Hal and your cousin."

Ben glanced at the comm. "But I didn't rig anything."

"So we'd better fragging _hurry_ ," Melody shot back through clenched teeth before rattling off a string of numbers and shoving him in the direction of a cell block.

He scowled at her, secure in the knowledge that she couldn't see his expression and murder him for looking at her wrong, then began to pick his way down the long narrow cell block. There were doors on either side of him, with no indication whether or not they were occupied. He wondered if they were - if whoever was locked up had heard all the blaster file and the alarms and was hoping against hope that someone had come to free them.

That was the most unrealistic thing about Sasha's holodramas, he decided: they didn't mention how _awful_ the galaxy was.

When he finally found the number Melody had given him, he hoped against hope that it was his cousin.

It wasn't.

It wasn't Hal, either.

"Er," Ben said.

The very pretty, very _familiar_ girl sitting on the cell's bench blinked up at him and then folded her arms. "And what do you think you're doing?" she asked him with far too much authority for someone sitting on the wrong side of a detention cell door. "You're the worst stormtrooper I've ever seen."

"I'm not a stormtrooper," Ben grumbled, trying to place where he had seen the girl before. She was about his age and very pretty, despite looking rather haggard. Her purple dress was slightly rumpled, but made of some kind of expensive-looking shimmery fabric, and her elaborate hairstyle, with its hundreds of tiny braids coiled into a bun at the nape of her neck, was threaded through with some kind of bright golden metal. Whoever she was, she was obviously wealthy. And wasn't _that_ confusing, since at least on Tatooine, rich people didn't usually wind up locked up in -

Recognition belatedly hit.

"You're the girl with the space yacht! You sent the message!"

In an instant, she was on her feet. "You have my message?"

"Sort of?" He stepped away from the cell door, giving her room to get out. "We're trying to find someone else, so if you know any of the other prisoners, maybe - "

The girl hurried past him.

" - you can help us," Ben finished as he ran after her.

By the time he caught up with her, she was gingerly stepping over a dead stormtrooper and somehow managing to ignore Melody's glare. Ben didn't have that kind of superpower, so he skidded to a halt under the force of her glower.

"Ben!" she snapped. "This isn't the time to make new friends!"

"She was in the cell you told me check!" He glanced around, his heart sinking. "Sasha?"

"Not there." She jabbed a finger over her shoulder. There was no sign of whoever had been in the cell. Ben just hoped she hadn't shot them, too. "Where the fragging hell is Hal?"

"I don't know!" Ben took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down. "Can't we just open all the cells until we find him and Sasha?"

"Not unless you want an army's worth of prisoners trying to hitch a ride with us." Melody bit her lip and eyed the cell blocks, gaze darting from one to the next. "Lady, any idea where Rage would put a Force user?"

The girl pulled her attention away from the turbolift, where she was undoubtedly - and quite sensibly, in Ben's opinion - watching for Imps; he doubted very much that any of them actually believed Melody's claim about him setting booby traps. "I'm sorry," she said, " _who_ did you say you were again?"

"The only person who can get you off this ship, princess."

"Wouldn't your Force user friend need to be somewhere more secure than a regular detention block? I thought Jedi can…" Here she trailed off and made some vague waving motions that Ben couldn't interpret.

Melody obviously could, however. "Hal's not a Jedi. He's pretty fragging useless with the Force."

The girl shrugged.

"Damnit." She scrubbed her hands down her face and looked over at Ben. "Don't just sit there. Find him."

Ben risked looking away from her long enough to peer down the long rows of cells, each the same as the last. "I'm really better at fixing things."

"That's not what I meant! If you can sabotage a transport by accident, then you can damn well find Hal!"

Now Ben knew exactly what she was asking. He wanted to remind her that he had no idea what he was doing, that Hal wasn't a machine and machines were all he had ever been good at, but the protests died before he could voice them. There was something wild and desperate in Melody's eyes that was much stronger than all his doubts and all his fears of being caught - stronger even than the rock-solid certainty he had felt earlier, that she was going to be the one who wound up getting him killed.

"I don't know how," he said, his voice small and muted even to his own ears.

" _Try_."

He closed his eyes.

Nothing happened - no sudden revelations, no flashes of insight. "I don't feel anything."

Small strong hands clamped down on his shoulders, and he opened his eyes to find Melody right in front of him. "You listen to me," she ground out through clenched teeth. "You and I both know you aren't getting off this ship without me, and I'm not leaving without Hal. So if you want to save that cousin of yours, you _find him_."

Ben let out a breath that was more shaky and panicky than calming, closed his eyes again, and tried to think of Hal as a piece of a machine - that one loose part that didn't fit right in the well-maintained machinery of the Star Destroyer's crew. It wasn't the same, of course - people had their own thoughts and feelings and motivations, and no matter how loyal or trained the Imps were, they didn't move as one in the same smooth way an engine would - but after a few moments he thought he could feel very faint swirls and patterns around him, little more than soft currents in the air. He moved along them the same way he might follow an unfamiliar circuit board, groping blindly for something that didn't belong.

And then, very suddenly, his attention was snagged so quickly that it felt like someone grabbing him by the collar. A voice that sounded a lot like Hal's appeared in his mind without bothering to deal with his ears first.

"Four twenty-one," he echoed.

Melody shoved him. "Hurry. The princess and I will start looking for your cousin."

"I'm not a princess," the girl muttered as Ben hurried down what he hoped was the correct corridor.

This time it actually was Hal in the cell. He was standing by the door like he had been waiting for a visitor and he did _not_ look happy.

"Good going," he snapped in place of a greeting. "If Rage didn't know you were here before, he damn well does now."

Ben didn't mutter things about ungrateful pilots under his breath as he once again found himself chasing someone back through the detention bay, but he thought it, _hard_.

"We might be in trouble," Melody said as he followed Hal back to the controls. She reached across the controls long enough to touch Hal's arm, like she wanted to make sure he was real, but a moment later she was all business. "Artoo's pretty sure they're not holding Solo or that cousin of yours here."

The girl gave a start and looked at Melody with sudden and very calculating interest. " _Han_ Solo?"

"You know any others?" Melody swore and smacked the console. "We need to try the other detention bay. They've got to be there."

"Rage has Sasha in the officers' quarters," Hal said. He held his hand out to Ben and raised an eyebrow; Ben handed over his blaster rifle immediately, glad to be rid of it. "I don't know how we're going to get to - "

He stopped abruptly, jerked back like he had been struck, and pointed his new weapon right at the turbolifts.

Melody reacted immediately, shoving Ben and the girl behind her and readying her own weapon. For a few long, tense moments there was no sound at all, and then Ben heard the whine of machinery and the turbolift doors flew open in a bang of light and smoke. By the time he had finished flinching back and blinking to clear his vision, Melody and Hal had already opened fire on the Imps trying to pour into the detention bay. They bottlenecked and collapsed down on top of each other, one after the other, some screaming, some silent. Ben stumbled and tripped over something that he desperately hoped wasn't one of the dead officers, only barely managing to catch himself on the console.

"Get back! Get back!" Hal shoved the girl back towards one of the cell blocks. Ben retreated after her, trying to see through his helmet's eyeports and the smoke from the blaster bolt discharge. Melody and Hal followed after them, still moving and shooting with all the precision of trained soldiers. There were a set of support struts jutting out from the bulkhead, and at Hal's order they all crammed behind them, backs pressed awkwardly against cell doors as a storm of blaster bolts flew past.

The girl was huddled opposite Ben, squashed up next to Hal, and she gave him a wide-eyed, terrified look before visibly pulling herself together. "Now what are we going to do?"

"Honestly?" Melody stuck one arm out from behind the strut long enough to fire off a shot, then quickly ducked back under cover. "We didn't think that far ahead."

"Of course you didn't. Why am I not surprised?" The girl covered her ears as something further down the cell block crashed to the deck, knocked loose by a stray shot. "We're going to die if we stay here. This is a terrible rescue!"

Ben personally agreed with her, but he decided this wasn't the time to voice his opinion. "We need a way out of here."

"Garbage chute?" Hal offered. There was a cry of pain somewhere at the far end of the corridor as one of his shots found its target. "That worked for Han."

Melody muttered something that involved trash compactors happening to particular parts of Hal's anatomy. "No more damn garbage chutes," she added, gaze darting around the cell block as if searching the bulkheads for any secret doors. "Not after that thing with Nar Shaddaa."

"Not my fault, Mel. If _someone_ had been able to speak Gamorrean - "

She cut him off with an extremely rude gesture. "All right, fragface, then what about the turbolift tubes?"

The girl made an incredulous noise. "Where all the stormtroopers are?"

"I don't hear you offering any brilliant ideas, princess."

"I'm _not_ a princess. And it's hard to think with this noise." The girl closed her eyes for a moment, the same way Aunt Olivea had when she had been trying to keep a grip on her temper. "Can't you Jedi your way out of this?"

Hal gave her a look best described as deeply, profoundly annoyed. "Do we _look_ like Jedi to you? Start giving useful advice or shut up."

The girl huffed and then reached over and snatched Hal's rifle right out of his grip. Before he could take it back, she pointed it at the floor and shot out a panel. "We don't really have to go into the garbage chute, now do we?" she said as she tossed his weapon back to him. "We just have to make them think we did."

Everyone stared at her.

"There are air ducts right there." She jabbed one manicured finger at the ceiling and flashed a tight, saccharine smile. "I swear, I have to do everything around here."

* * *

Lieutenant Archimedes held a peculiar position on the _Retaliator_. She was an officer, but not a particularly high-ranking one, and her personnel file gave the impression that she was a glorified errand girl. Anyone with a functioning brain, however, ignored the file completely and focused on the rumors, which went something like this:

Lord Rage was the Emperor's right hand. He had strange and supernatural powers, perhaps learned from Organa's Jedi, perhaps stolen from them. He was the one who had taken down the Death Star, once upon a time. He had destroyed his predecessor so thoroughly that only vague legends remained.

Surely a man like that had a right hand of his own.

The officers who scrambled to let her into what was left of the detention block were also lieutenants, but that didn't stop them from deferring to her immediately. When she dismissed them from the detention block with a quick nod, they left her alone without a word of objection. That gave her plenty of space to survey the destruction at her leisure. 

"They've made a mess of the place," she said into her comlink. "Numerous fatalities and damage to the consoles and surveillance equipment."

"How bad?" Lord Rage asked.

She debated. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have carried a camera and transmitted images back to him, or even remained on the command decks while he examined the damage himself. These were far from ordinary circumstances, however; the hangar bay crash and ensuing fire damage had knocked out a small but significant part of the _Retaliator_ 's communications systems, and while everyone was fairly sure the detention block wasn't really about to explode, allowing someone as important as Lord Rage into a situation where he could be catapulted into outer orbit was obviously out of the question.

"It's...impressive," she concluded after a moment. Her eyes fell on the blaster burns around the cameras. "Although one of our guests is a terrible shot."

"You checked the garbage chutes?"

"I delegated." She stepped into the cell block with the most blaster damage and began looking for exits. Almost immediately, her attention was caught by the ceiling panel sitting slightly ajar. "I believe they opted for the air ducts instead."

Lord Rage sighed. "So they could be anywhere."

"The detention bay ventilation system should still be sealed off from the rest of the ship. The bulkheads are blasterproof."

"They have a lightsaber."

All right, that made the situation slightly more challenging. "Are you certain you would prefer them alive, my lord?"

" _Lieutenant_."

Lieutenant Archimedes sighed to herself. She was hardly an advocate of brute force or unnecessary deaths, but there was something to be said for a properly-applied hull breach. Far be it for her to question orders, however. "As you wish. I will post extra guards on Captain Solo. I suggest you do the same with the girl, if you haven't already. I will report as soon as I find anything significant."

"I look forward to it," Lord Rage said dryly.

Once he had switched off his comm - presumably to go make sure the settler girl hadn't taken advantage of the chaos to escape somehow - Lieutenant Archimedes turned her attention back to what was left of the detention bay. Whoever had destroyed the cameras had made up in thoroughness what they lacked in accuracy, and with the communications systems so badly damaged, the backups were doubtless unrecoverable. Much of the console had been destroyed by blaster fire as well, but the bulky, primitive audio recorder was still more or less intact, strapped to the underside of the comm controls and undamaged except for a bit of scoring. It was an old piece of equipment, a holdover from the Republic battleships several centuries earlier, and much like the rest of the _Retaliator_ and its crew, it wasn't exactly standard issue.

Lord Rage had been raised in the Outer Rim and learned tactics and strategy in the Rebellion. In many ways, he still thought like a Rebel commander. It was one of the traits Lieutenant Archimedes admired most about him.

Working quickly and efficiently, she extracted the audio recorder from its protective casing and downloaded its data into her comlink's memory. She began to play back the last half-click as she moved on to the comm controls, the better to sift out important bits and pieces before sending the recording on to the  _Retaliator_ 's intelligence agents. _  
_

Then she realized what she was actually hearing.

She frowned and played back the relevant part of the recording again. And again. And again once more, just to be sure.

_Oh._

Well, that wouldn't do at all.

Without missing a beat, she replaced the recorder, took three carefully-measured steps back, and shot it. Only when she was sure it was a smoking, ruined wreck did she go back to her careful triage. She was Lord Rage's right hand, after all, and he trusted her to do her job efficiently and well.

It was deeply unfortunate that none of the detention block's recording equipment had survived, she noted in her datapad. Not even the backups.

Firefights caused such astonishing collateral damage.

* * *

The Naberrie family was firmly entrenched in the old aristocracy of Naboo, and like many of the most ancient families, they were more or less content to live in comfortable obscurity well outside of Theed proper. Against this backdrop, Padmé Amidala had been a sort of glorious anomaly, come and gone in a single blinding flash like a comet. Far more common, at least in Lucéa's opinion, was the likes of her mother Pooja - a dutiful career politician, outspoken in a genteel sort of way, firm convictions tempered by a respect for the family legacy and an enlightened sense of self-preservation. It hadn't won her the undying love of the people of Naboo, but there was a reason why one woman was living under house arrest at the Naberrie summer home and the other was in a mausoleum. 

Her mother was a member of the Rebel Alliance whose opposition to the Empire went down to her bones, just as Lucéa was. She was also not nearly as much as a risk-taker and clearly disapproved of her daughter gallivanting all over the galaxy with a fugitive Jedi, even if she was willing to cover for her. 

"And of course you'll want to be back in time for the governor's wedding," Pooja was saying over the holoproj, sounding for all the world as if she was making an ordinary gossipy social call. She was a regal and matronly-looking woman, with a round face and curly hair she wore up in the sort of elaborate coif Lucéa rarely bothered with outside of Theed, and she could pack a lot of coded information into a perfectly routine-sounding holo. "That would be right before the king returns from his tour of the Otoh Gunga ruins."

Lucéa glanced at Anakin, safely out of view on the other side of the holoproj. She still needed to return him and Threepio to a suitably anonymous Outer Rim port before she returned to Naboo. "I was hoping not to cut my vacation short, Mother." 

Her mother pursed her lips. "I'm not going to find rumors about you running around the Lake Country with some boy all over the Holonet, am I?"

The answer was yes, in all likelihood. Lucéa had entered Theed's vicious political circles as a young teenager and had quickly discovered that - coming as she did from a storied but politically questionable family - it was far easier to deal with rumors about her personal life than with whispers that she was a secret member of the Rebel Alliance. Ridiculous Holonet stories about her frolicking in the countryside with some boy or another did her reputation no great harm, gave the decidedly false impression that she wasn't particularly absorbed in politics, and provided a convenient way to explain her absences. Her mother knew all that, of course, and was no doubt crafting some suitably benign and ridiculous cover story for her at that very moment.

What Lucéa actually said aloud was, "I have another comm coming in, Mother. I'll get back to you in a moment."

She cut the connection before her mother could protest. There was in fact another comm coming in - to her old Holonet ID from her school days, no less - but she had no interest in answering it. Instead she raised an eyebrow at Anakin, who managed to look  _very_  amused for someone with such a serene expression on his face.

"Not a  _word_ ," she said.

"I wouldn't dream of it." He nodded to the holoproj. The comm indicator was still blinking. "Someone really wants to talk to you."

That was a little odd, Lucéa had to admit. Whoever was comming her had bypassed her message system. "That's not my regular ID. No one I need to talk to would be comming me with it."

"I think you should answer it."

If he had been anyone else in the galaxy, she would have invited him to get out of his chair and answer it himself - but he was Anakin and his gaze was focused on something Lucéa would never be able to see, so she sighed and switched the holoproj to incoming audio only. She wouldn't risk exposing herself or Anakin just because he had a hunch. _  
_

_"Lucéa! Lucéa, please answer!"_

It was a girl's voice, wholly unfamiliar, with the rounded vowels and low pitch of a very heavy Coruscant accent. She sounded terrified.

Anakin was already half out of his seat. Lucéa kept her hand over the comm, blocking his access to it, but didn't open the channel. There were too many ways in which this could be a trap, for him or for her.

_"You need to help me,"_ the message continued. _"I can't talk about it, not like this. I sent everything to Jessa, but I've heard that her ship was - "_ The girl's voice hitched, slipped into a whispered prayer, and then came back higher and quicker and more frantic. _"Please answer! Someone has to kn - "_

The transmission ended in a burst of noise and static.

Lucéa curled her hand back from the controls, ignored the cold pit in her stomach, and steepled her fingers to press them to her mouth. She hadn't realized she had been holding her breath.

Those last sounds had been blaster fire.

Anakin glanced at her as the recording finished. If he was judging her for not answering the comm, nothing showed on his face. "You don't know her?"

She permitted herself a moment to make sure her face was placid and her voice steady and calm. Some gut instinct told her she had just heard a murder. "Not exactly," she said at last. "She used my ID from when I was still at the academy, so she would be someone from there. That would be thousands of people, though." She gave him a small, tight-lipped smile. "A few dozen of us were expelled for trying to organize a student government. Whoever this is, I must be the closest thing to a Rebel contact she has."

"Do you have any idea what she was talking about?"

Lucéa shook her head. "The Jessa she mentioned must be Jessa Calrissian. She was in the student government with me, but I didn't know her well and haven't spoken to her since we were expelled." She forced herself to lay her palms flat in her lap, to take the time to smooth down the wrinkles in her jumpsuit and tuck stray wisps of hair behind her ears. It was mindless and soothing, something she could change and correct. "It sounds like something happened to Calrissian. I'll give you a list of name. I need to see if the other expelled students are missing."

Anakin nodded. "I'll have Threepio help me. What are you going to do?"

She curved her lips up into what she thought of as her politician's smile. "Comm my mother and tell her to send my regrets. I'm afraid I'll have to miss the governor's wedding."

* * *

Han wasn't sure who he was expecting to walk into his cell when the door hissed open. An interrogation team, maybe. An execution squad. Maybe even Hal, because even if the kid escaped, of course he would be dumb enough to come back for him.

Archimedes hadn't even made the list.

"Captain Solo." She inclined her head and shut the door behind her. "I apologize for disturbing you, but I'm afraid there has been a small change of plans."

She held out a blaster pistol, the grip facing him.

He took it and glanced down just long enough to check that it was actually charged, then pointed it at her. "What the hell is this?"

Archimedes didn't blink. "I would avoid shooting me just yet, Captain. I assure you, my death will make it much more difficult for you to leave this ship."

This was some kind of trick. It had to be. "What, you switching sides now?"

"Don't insult me, Captain." She opened the door again and stood beside it, back ramrod-straight like a royal guard. "I will escort you out of the detention bay. After that, I'm afraid you'll have to find your copilot and his companions on their own."

She was clearly waiting for Han to move, but he didn't. He kept his blaster trained on her, his mind spinning. He didn't believe for a minute that she was doing this out of sympathy for him or the Rebellion, not for a damn minute, and after their conversation earlier, he couldn't see Luke - couldn't see _Rage_ being behind this, either.

"This is your only chance to leave," Archimedes said.

That, at least, he believed. He motioned for her to leave the cell first. When she obeyed without complaint, he followed her, keeping his blaster trained on her. There was no other sound in the whole detention bay except their footsteps on the deck, no guards, no officers. Everything was deserted.

She took up that same parade guard stance beside the turbolift. "Deck 97 will be a safe place to exit. From there, I suggest you remain in the maintenance area and check the ventilation system. I'm sure your companions will be along sooner or later."

Well, at least it wasn't the garbage chute. He hit the call button for the turbolift, but made no other move towards it. "I trust you as far as I can throw this ship," he said, keeping the blaster aimed at her face. "So I'm going to ask you one more time. What the hell are you doing?"

Archimedes gave him a look of perfectly polite bafflement.

"I'm a soldier," she said. "What else would I be doing, Captain Solo? I'm following orders." 


	13. Chapter Thirteen

_"The records clearly show that all targets in the creche were accounted for and successfully liquidated. With all due respect to Agent Quallum's theory, whatever affection Bail Organa may have had for the old Order, it does not appear to have extended to rescuing an infant."_  
\- _Agent Mendell Py, "ISB Internal Report 612-137: The Second Jedi Insurrection and the Origins of Leia Organa" (classified)_

_"Memories have stone roots."_  
_\- Naboo proverb_

\--

Denilee Luwellan woke up from a dream that might, possibly, have been a nightmare.

She sat straight up in her bed, engulfed in septsilk quilts and surrounded by pillows and a small army of soft plush tookas, and tried to make sense of it. It had been a strange and surreal thing, and she hadn't felt afraid, not really - but there had been water, and then there had been beings floating in it, hundreds and thousands of them, all very still and with wide-open eyes and gaping mouths.

She didn't know what it meant. She _did_ know, in some deep-down way, that it wasn't the sort of dream six-year-olds were supposed to have, and so she resolved not to tell her father about it. It went against the credo he had drilled into her head ever since she was a baby, maybe even since the day he had adopted her and her sister.

_Don't stand out. Don't attract attention. If your friends go missing, don't ask questions. Keep quiet, whatever you do._

Denilee wasn't very good at any of those things. Her father said she was making him go prematurely gray.

Too jittery to close her eyes and try to sleep, she slid out of her bed and let her bare feet sink into the soft carpet. It was very late or maybe very early - it was hard to tell - but when she pulled back her curtains, she saw millions and millions of tiny lights glittering like stars. They all lived on the top of one of the best residential towers on Imperial Center, her and her father and her big sister when she was home from boarding school, and from her window Denilee could see the hulking shape of the Emperor's palace in the distance, where her father did something-or-other with databases. She could see her school, Education Center 14, which was where all the children of very important people like her father went and where they occasionally disappeared from when the Emperor decided their parents weren't very important anymore. If she squished her nose against the clear plastisteel and craned her head just right, she could see the moon.

She was less jittery now, but not tired at all. She also knew that the kitchen droids were powered down for the night, which meant that there was nothing standing between her and the bubble cakes her father had been stockpiling for Empire Day, the ones she wasn't supposed to touch or even _look at_ until after he had a bunch of moffs over for a dinner party.

Denilee wasn't very good at following directions, either.

When she padded out of her room and toward the kitchen, she expected to hear the familiar middle-of-the-night sounds she had grown up with: the hum of the kitchen unit, the steps of the sentry droids, maybe the faint voices of a holodrama from her big sister's room now that Alai was home from school for the holidays and watching whatever it was sixteen-year-olds watched. Instead she heard strange sounds coming from the direction of the entry - odd buzzing noises, like bugs going past her ears.

Denilee changed course and walked through the dining room - the big one with the best furniture, big enough to hold a dinner party's worth of moffs - and then through the smaller sitting room, taking the roundabout approach to the entry. When she touched the control panel, the lighting strips that ran around the ceiling didn't even flicker. Now she was starting to get annoyed and maybe just a little worried. Power outages happened all the time in the lower levels of Imperial Center - she knew that because she had heard her father telling her big sister to never venture down there, not ever - but they didn't happen up _here_.

It was very dark, even with the lights streaming through cracks in the curtains, and she didn't see the shape on the ground until she tripped over it and went sprawling, scraping her hands on the carpet. She bit her tongue to stifle a yell and turned back to see what it was she had stumbled over.

She was staring into the blank-eyed face of a deactivated sentry droid, toppled over and left on the floor like one of her dolls.

Now, suddenly, Denilee wasn't worried. She was scared, more than she had ever been in her dream.

She scrambled to her feet and hurried back to her big sister's room, but when she burst in there was no sign of her. The bed was still made and everything was still neat and tidy. It was as if Alai hadn't even come home that night, as if she had walked out of the apartment after breakfast laughing about an appointment and then simply ceased to exist.

There was a noise from the entry that sounded like crackling and popping. The ever-present background hum of the atmospheric scrubbers stopped and the emergency lights flickered on, making everything look dim and yellow and strange. Denilee made a noise that sounded strangled even to her ears and ran for her father's bedroom.

Halfway there, an alarm she hadn't even known existed began to go off.

When she burst into her father's room, he was awake - just scrambling out of bed, unshaven, his pale hair sticking up all over the place. He caught her when she launched herself into his arms, hiding her face against his shoulder, but he kept moving. Still holding her, he knelt down and scrambled under the bed and pulled out a blaster.

Her father wasn't a soldier. He fixed databases. He wasn't even supposed to _have_ a blaster.

"Daddy?" Denilee whispered.

"Be quiet," he told her. When she bit her lip and nodded, he quickly carried her into his study, where all of the datapads she wasn't allowed to touch were kept. He selected one, then two, removed the memory chips, and smashed them on the desk with the blaster, grinding them into dust.

Denilee scrubbed at her eyes and tried to stop tears from welling up in them. Outside, by the entry, something boomed like ships colliding and she remembered the stories she and her classmates whispered about the students who disappeared, about how soldiers came for them in the night and everyone pretended not to see, because the Emperor had decided their parents weren't important anymore.

The booming came again. Her father looked around frantically and then carried her to the garden, where she hid from her homework and the nanny droids high up in the jiri trees. The garden doors were as big and sturdy as the ones in the entry, with locks her father had encrypted himself and thick durasteel plates and their own energy source. She remembered that once he had grinned at her and jokingly threatened to lock her out in the garden forever the next time she skipped out on her tutoring.

_"I'm the only one who can unlock those locks, kiddo. If I don't feel like telling anybody the codes, you'll be stuck out there for weeks."_

She had promptly tested him the next day. He had indeed locked the doors, but only long enough for her to start stamping her feet and calling him a big jerk.

But that had been a beautiful afternoon and they had both been laughing and everything had been a game. Now it was cold and dark, and without the atmospheric scrubbers, the cold wind puncturing the permeable walls of the garden whipped around her. When her father set her down, the familiar gravel path bit into the bare soles of her feet.

"Where's the fire exit?" he asked her. There was a harsh urgency in his voice that she had never heard before. "Do you remember? Not the emergency lift. Where are the stairs?"

She was crying in earnest now, almost too hard to speak, so she pointed to the big jiri tree in the corner. It had overgrown most of the ancient fire exit a long time ago. She had had to scramble under its roots just to find the old unlit stairs.

Her father crouched in front of her and gripped her shoulder. "Don't ever let them catch you. _Promise me_ , Denilee."

She nodded once. Inside the apartment, something exploded and the ground under her feet rocked.

"Run." Her father pushed her towards the big jiri tree and then stepped back into the apartment.

Denilee froze.

" _Run!_ " her father yelled as the doors closed.

But Denilee couldn't. She took one step back, then another, but she watched as the doors slid shut. She watched the soldiers in black armor round the corner in the hallway, spilling up from the entry, looking like monsters in the yellow glow of the emergency lights.

She watched her father move his blaster up, like he was about to point it at his own chin.

The doors slammed closed and the locks engaged. There was the sound of a single blaster shot.

Denilee fell down on the gravel path.

_Run!_ something inside her yelled. _You promised! Run!_

She half-crawled, half-ran for the jiri tree and flopped down on her belly to fit under the roots. Her nightgown tore and bark snagged at her hair. She ignored everything and ran into the fire exit and down the ancient rickety stairs. From somewhere above came the sound of another explosion, much larger than the first. The walls trembled. Someone started to scream.

Denilee ran down and down and down into the murky depths of Imperial Center. High above her, the apartment began to burn.

\--

Lucéa was good at hiding what she was really feeling. Most Naboo were. Off-worlders thought of them as aloof and uncaring, not realizing that this was precisely the point.

Theed's etiquette was complicated and convoluted. Lucéa had learned it from her grandmother, who - possessing every bit of Great-Aunt Padmé's formidable intelligence and exactly none of her taste for politics - had opted to channel her intellect into navigating the cutthroat social world of Naboo high society. The reserve Lucéa and those like her had learned to display in front of the king and the moff, intended though it was as self-possession, was easily misinterpreted by non-Naboo as a haughty sort of complete and utter disinterest - and for Lucéa, that disinterest was just as valuable a mask as silly Holonet rumors about country holidays and frivolous trysts.

It was quite unfortunate that absolutely none of her hard-earned skills had any effect on Anakin.

"Are you okay?" he asked when she very pointedly did _not_ slam her fist down on _Queen of Mercy_ 's comm controls. The way he said it, it wasn't actually a question at all.

Lucéa took a deep breath. She was most certainly not okay. "That's seven," she said in a perfectly level voice. "Eight, counting whoever it was that commed me."

Anakin gave her a long look, but pulled up the list he was helping her compile and quickly added to it. It now consisted of seven familiar names: Ly Ito, Sandra San-Kastri, Pria Olkwin, Nanna Freerunner, Hee Golland, Bodie Besh, and Jessa Calrissian. All of them had participated in the same aborted student-government experiment as Lucéa, and all of them had been expelled from Santi-Solis Ladies' Academy for it, just as she had been.

Now, all of them were missing.

She hadn't tried contacting any of the other expelled students - not yet. She suspected she already knew what the results would be.

"We don't know what happened to them," Anakin said with what she felt was a poor attempt at optimism. "They could just be out of contact."

Lucéa dropped polite Naboo serenity long enough to glare at him. They were missing, that was what mattered; dead or disappeared, in the Core there wasn't much difference. "That seems highly unlikely, don't you think?"

His sigh told her that however much he might like to argue, he secretly agreed with her.

Someone or something was going after her expelled schoolmates. The sheer suddenness and brazenness of their disappearances - along with the fact that most of them were from very prominent backgrounds - made Lucéa suspect that the Empire was involved somehow. In all likelihood, she was also a target.

Worse, her mother and grandmother might be as well.

She was going to have to decide - quickly - if going back to Naboo, where she was unquestionably more vulnerable, and keeping her position as deputy prime minister was worth risking their lives as well as her own.

She cleared her throat and attempted to steer the conversation in a different direction. "How long until we reach this base of yours?"

Because that was where they were heading: the Rebel base and the collection of rundown and out-of-date ships that passed as its fleet. There was no point in trying to circumspectly deliver Anakin to a halfway point if she was hiding from would-be kidnappers and murderers, state-sponsored or otherwise - and if someone was killing the daughters of high-profile families, the Rebel Alliance's intelligence arm needed to know. The disappearances could signal a potential instability in the Empire, perhaps even something that could be used to win important factions or worlds to the Rebellion's side.

She hadn't known all seven of those girls well, but they had been as driven and determined as she was. She tried not to hate herself too much for thinking of them so coldly and distantly, as nothing more than pawns - for wearing that disinterested mask even for herself and pretending they hadn't had families, too.

Anakin was peering at her, but whatever it was he sensed, he let it drop and smiled instead. "If I told you where we were going, I'd have to kill you, you know." He checked the navigation console. "We're almost there. And we're actually sort of between bases at the moment. Hope you don't mind a visit to an old Star Cruiser."

"Wonderful," Lucéa said flatly. She rose from her seat in one fluid motion. "I'll be in my quarters. Let me know when we're ready to dock."

Leaving _Queen of Mercy_ in Anakin's capable hands, she quickly returned to her cabin and set about doing all the mindless little necessary things that always accompanied clandestine trips like this. She pulled up her own navicomputer console and double-checked that the logs were automatically erasing. She found herself a cloak made of a heavy draping fabric she couldn't immediately identify and a deep hood that would shadow her face. She summoned Threepio long enough to give him instructions on what to do if it became necessary to flee before Anakin had returned to fetch him.

And then, finally, there was her hair.

Lucéa's grandmother had taught her this, too. There were certain ironclad laws behind the most intricate of those complicated braids and twists - which could only be worn by a queen and a queen alone, which were for off-worlders' eyes and which weren't, which signaled support for this faction or that. There was no style deemed appropriate for meeting the chief intelligence officer of a secret revolution on an outdated and possibly unsafe battleship, so for the moment she simply worked on autopilot, braiding her hair into one thick plait as she frowned at her reflection.

She didn't look exactly like Great-Aunt Padmé. Not really, anyway. Not up close. But she was just similar enough - a tilt of the jaw here, an arch of the eyebrows there - that the mistake was easy to make from a distance. The Naboo had great fondness for their onetime ruler, so the resemblance had been a benefit more than a burden; Lucéa didn't begrudge it and never had.

And yet.

Undoubtedly the legendary Queen Amidala wouldn't have thought of her old schoolmates as tools, not even for a moment. Surely it would have repulsed her.

Lucéa set her jaw and quickly wrapped her braid in a crown around her head. It was a simple style, common among the Alderaanian diaspora scattered across Naboo, that had no place in Theed political circles. Her grandmother would have been appalled.

So be it. There was little place for Great-Aunt Padmé's lofty ideals in the galaxy now.

When she returned to the cockpit, cloak around her shoulders and braid firmly pinned in place, Anakin was just bringing _Queen of Mercy_ out of hyperspace. They appeared right in front of the Rebel fleet, which was the same depressing sight it always was, although Lucéa had truly only seen it from afar. It was a collection of antiques in questionable states of repair, all huddled together as if for protection. Lucéa's sleek ship stuck out without even trying to.

She slid into the pilot's seat as Anakin opened a comm channel and rattled off a complex series of codes that she wasn't going to bother trying to memorize. Once he had received permission to dock from _Home One_ , he ignored the copilot's chair in favor of lurking behind her.

Lucéa gave him a sour look as she steered _Queen of Mercy_ towards the largest and least decrepit of the Rebel ships. "Could you at least tell me if General Palla is on _Home One_ , while you're encroaching on my personal space? She's the one I'll need to speak to."

"That's not really how the Force works," Anakin said cheerfully, but he backed away from her chair while Lucéa went about flying _Queen of Mercy_ with more wounded dignity than was strictly necessary.

When they docked, the only people waiting to meet them at _Home One_ 's airlock were a pair of guards. That wasn't terribly surprising, of course; the Rebellion valued security, but it was perpetually lacking in manpower and Anakin was trusted and well-known, having been practically raised in the fleet. What _did_ surprise Lucéa was the way one of the guards snapped to attention and saluted - probably a holdover from whatever military he had defected from.

"Your Highness," the guard said, and Lucéa had a moment of profound confusion before she glanced at Anakin. There was the faintest twitch of embarrassment marring his otherwise placid Jedi composure. "Admiral Antilles wishes to speak to you and your guest in the command center as soon as possible."

With what she felt was superhuman restraint, Lucéa watched Anakin acknowledge the guard with a polite nod and then waited until they were safely out of earshot before she quirked an eyebrow. " _Your Highness?_ "

This time the embarrassment was plain to see. It made Anakin actually look his age, rather than like an old soul trying to carry a whole galaxy on his shoulders. "His parents are Alderaanian. I feel bad asking him to stop."

Sometimes it was difficult to remember that Leia Organa hadn't been born a half-mythical Jedi, much less that she had been rather important in the grand sweep of galactic history long before she picked up a lightsaber. "You're a prince of Alderaan, are you? Shall I curtsy?"

"Don't you start."

"You could always abdicate."

"I tried," he said in something that could almost be called a grumble. "They have an elected ruling council, you know. It's just a ceremonial title, but they won't let me give it up."

She tried to imagine Anakin maneuvering his way through the tangled political infighting that plagued every government, even if said government consisted largely of crotchety white-haired Alderaanian nobility-in-exile. Maybe it was the potential death threat looming over her, but the absurdity of that image made it very hard not to laugh, her grandmother's etiquette lessons be damned. "I'll have you know," she said instead, "that as deputy prime minister, I'm third in line for the Naboo throne. I'm more than happy to inherit another one."

"Maybe I'll take you up on that," Anakin muttered as they stepped into the lift. Like everything else on _Home One_ , it was older than Lucéa by several decades and made her miss _Queen of Mercy_ 's sleek, clean lines. "Do you think the admiral already knows about your missing friends?"

"Schoolmates, not friends," Lucéa corrected, but yes, it did seem odd that Admiral Antilles had summoned her without prompting. Aside from providing shelter and financial assistance to the Rebel cell in Theed, her primary connection to the Rebellion was through General Palla's intelligence network, not its military.

She pulled her deep hood down to shade her face as the lift rumbled and shuddered to a halt. The Rebellion didn't value the regal poise and stoic dignity her grandmother had worked so hard to instill in her - and there was certainly no reason for her to feign disinterest right at that moment - but old habits died hard. There was no point in letting anyone see just how worried she actually was.

Those worries only heightened when the room Anakin led her into proved to contain more than just Admiral Antilles. General Palla was there as well. To Lucéa's great astonishment, so was Chancellor Mon Mothma, frail but still sharp-eyed. Lucéa hastily clasped her hands in front of her and bowed in what she hoped was the proper Chandrillan fashion before standing straight-backed beside Anakin.

"Minister Naberrie," Admiral Antilles said with a slight nod. "Jedi Organa. If you would."

Lucéa glanced at Anakin, who gave her the faintest of shrugs. Once they had joined the majority of the Rebellion's leadership around a large holoprojector, Admiral Antilles activated it, projecting dozens and dozens of grayed-out faces arranged in a grid.

Lucéa sucked in a breath. She had a good memory and recognized the majority of the young women. They were all Santi-Solis students. Some of them were the seven names on her list or other expelled members of the student government, but the rest were classmates and roommates, utterly innocent and - as far as she was aware - still safely enrolled. A few she even counted as personal friends, or as close as she could come to having friends when half of her life was a closely-guarded secret.

She didn't have to ask what had happened to them.

"When?" she asked instead, careful to keep her voice steady and her face impassive. "I spoke to some of them just before I left Naboo."

"Accidents. Disappearances. Tragic crimes." Admiral Antilles's expression was very grave. "Someone is targeting you and your schoolmates, Minister."

Lucéa's mind raced. This was far more than just an attempt to eliminate everyone who had taken part in the student government. Some of these girls were completely unknown to her, or faces without names, or barely-tolerated acquaintances who had whole-heartedly loved the Empire and everything it stood for. She forced herself to take a deep breath. "These are the daughters of very important people - of Imperial officers. Surely - "

"The Core lives and dies at the Emperor's pleasure," General Palla said. "You and I both know he's the only one with the power to do this. We need to know why he is killing your classmates, Minister Naberrie."

She shook her head. She would have been a fool to think someone in the Empire didn't suspect her and her family of Rebel sympathies, but _this?_ "I don't know, General. I wish I did. If I hadn't..." She forced herself to look back up at the faces and tried to call on every lesson in perfect dispassionate politeness that her grandmother had ever taught her. She felt a steadying touch on her shoulder that must have been Anakin's hand, so light that she could almost have imagined it. "If I had been on Naboo, I would be dead, too."

"And for that reason, I would encourage you to remain on _Home One_ , at least for the time being." Chancellor Mothma's voice was very soft, but Lucéa could hear the durasteel core underneath it. "I am aware of your duties to the Theed cell and to your people. However, you would be equally valuable here."

There were times when a lapse of Naboo etiquette was necessary. This was one of them, Lucéa decided. She respected the Chancellor too much to do otherwise. For that reason, she pulled back her hood and allowed some of the worry and fear she had worked so hard to hide to creep through into her voice. "With respect, Chancellor Mothma, I will remain with the fleet long enough to provide you with information on my schoolmates, but I will not abandon my home or my family. I _can't_."

"Understood," Chancellor Mothma said. Then her expression softened. "You are far more like her than I expected."

There was no need to ask whom she meant. There never was. "Queen Amidala was my grandmother's sister," she said as she reached back for her hood. "I'm pleased to have been told I resemble her."

"You do," Chancellor Mothma said quietly, "and she was a dear colleague of mine. But that wasn't to whom I was referring, Minister Naberrie."

Lucéa stood for a moment, frozen in place, the fabric of her hood held between her fingers. She darted a glance at Anakin, but his expression was even more unreadable than usual. She had been compared to her great-aunt for so long, in so many different ways, that the idea that she might bring to mind anyone else - in any way - seemed almost absurd. "Chancellor?"

In answer, Chancellor Mothma nodded to something behind her. Lucéa turned and saw what she had missed before.

A portion of the command room wall near the doors was a sort of shrine to the Rebellion's high command - to those who had been executed or hunted down or who had otherwise died striving to restore the Republic. She recognized most of them, if only from wanted notices or her great-aunt's holos: Bail and Breha Organa, Gial Ackbar, Garm Bel Iblis, Jan Dodonna.

In the center of them all, wearing the exact same crown of braids as Lucéa herself, was Leia Organa.

\--

It probably said something about the state of Hal's life that this wasn't the first time he had needed to escape from Imp custody. Hell, this wasn't even his first time crawling around in the bowels of a Star Destroyer, although that last little misadventure had involved more squabbling with scavengers over badly-needed spare parts and less running for his life. Fortunately, the Imps didn't have much of an imagination; they tended to cast their ships out of molds, so the ventilation shaft he was crawling through twisted and turned in a familiar and fairly predictable manner.

Which was why he wasn't all that surprising when he turned a corner and found himself face-to-face with a bulkhead.

"What the frag is this thing?" Melody asked as their entire escape party huddled around this newest obstacle like a gaggle of lost baby gundarks. She had shed her stolen Imp armor at some point - Hal wasn't entirely sure _how_ \- and she looked about as grimy and disheveled as he felt.

He sat back on his heels. "Quarantine barrier, I think. Rage has to know we're in here somewhere." He glanced back at Ben, who had only managed to lose his helmet and was sitting rather miserably on the deck, looking less like a person and more like a heap of discarded white armor. The ventilation shaft's sticky humidity had plastered his hair to his forehead and sweat was dripping off his nose.

Well, Hal thought with a very _very_ small pang of sympathy, this was hardly going to be the worst situation the kid found himself in. Not when that Force presence of his was pulsing like very compact, very self-contained, white-hot sun.

He jerked his chin at the lightsaber hanging from Ben's belt. "Let me borrow that."

Ben gave him a blank look. "My tools?"

"No, the lightsaber, idiot. It can handle durasteel." He held out his hand patiently until Ben finished laboriously unhooking it, caught it easily as it was tossed to him -

_fire death blood_

\- and immediately threw it away as hard and fast as he could. It landed on the deck with what sounded like a thunderous clatter in the confines of the ventilation shafts.

Ben was frozen in mid-motion, staring at him with round, startled eyes, alarm rippling through the Force.

Hal didn't care how scared he was. "Where the _hell_ did you get that?" he snarled.

Ben just shook his head. His gaze darted from Hal to the lightsaber and back again as if he wasn't sure which one was going to attack him first. "It's - I didn't - I found it. On Tatooine."

"And you don't _feel_ that?"

Now Ben just looked hopelessly lost. "Feel what?"

He had no idea, Hal realized. How was that even possible? He had felt Ben using the Force on Ludlii, mindlessly and unconsciously, the same way other beings used their lungs. And the shrieking of that lightsaber wasn't a small or subtle thing. It was a dark stain on the Force that to Hal, barely trained though he was, felt like screams of terror and the scraping of claws over raw nerves.

Why the hell couldn't Ben sense it?

He pushed his growing unease to the back of his mind and tried to stop his hands from clenching into fists. "That's not a Jedi's lightsaber."

"Wait, _what?_ " Melody demanded beside him. She rounded on Ben, who leaned so far away from her that he had to pinwheel his arms in order to avoid overbalancing and falling flat on the deck. "I swear to every fragging god out there, kid, just when I think you can't get us into any more trouble - "

Their newest tagalong cleared her throat.

Hal still wasn't entirely sure what to do with her. Everything about her, from her now-filthy dress to her Core accent to her neatly manicured nails, suggested _rich_ and _soft_ and _sheltered_. But she was the one who had suggested escaping through the air ducts in the first place. She had been locked up just like Hal instead of being summarily executed, she had crawled uncomplaining along with the rest of them, and now she reached down and snatched up the lightsaber before he could stop her.

"I don't care if this belonged to Rage himself," she said crisply. "We don't have time for whatever this nonsense is."

She pressed the hilt to the barrier. The red blade cut through it in a flash of _betrayal_ and _pain_ and _blood_.

Once they were past the smoking durasteel ruins and the lightsaber had been returned to Ben - the horrible shriek of it once again thoroughly muffled by his bright chaotic presence - they moved in relative silence for what felt like and might have actually been hours. Parts of Rage's ship weren't laid out exactly to Imp Navy regulations, as it turned out, but between Hal and Melody's combined knowledge and Artoo beeping at them over the comlink every time they made a wrong turn, they found themselves crowded around a grate, right above something that was probably a storage room.

There were a pair of presences somewhere just outside it, bored and methodical in a way that practically screamed Imps.

"Guards?" Melody whispered when Hal held up an arm to bring everyone to a halt.

"Outside. Two of them, probably stormtroopers." He tapped the barrel of her blaster rifle before she could switch the safety off. "We need to keep it down. There's others down the corridor."

"How can you tell?" Ben asked.

He pointed at his own temple and hoped that was enough of an answer. He didn't have time to go into the details of his haphazard training at the moment. "Just try not to make too much noise," he said as he eased the grate open.

They dropped to the deck as silently as possible - even the new girl, who let Ben catch her before quickly pulling herself upright to stand on her own two feet. Her presence was gray with fatigue at the edges, but she was holding up well enough for someone who obviously wasn't used to sneaking around warships and had just gone through who-knew-how-many days of interrogation and sleep deprivation.

Melody was already crouched behind the high towers of crates and boxes. She smirked as the girl slid down beside her with a sigh, her skirts puddling around her. "Try not to swoon on us, princess."

"Oh for the love of - " The girl scowled at all three of them, but at least had the sense to keep her voice down. "My name is Jessa Calrissian, not _princess_."

Hal glanced at Melody and saw her quirk an eyebrow. Their thoughts were clearly running on the same course. "The shipping company kind of Calrissian?" he asked, aiming for disinterested nonchalance.

Calrissian wasn't buying it. "As in nothing that will get you or the Rebellion a reward. All the company assets are in my father's and sister's names and they want nothing to do with this. Insurrections are bad for business." She waved a hand in one quick gesture, as if brushing aside her family and her wealth. "Forget about that. The message you're carrying is very important. It needs to get to the Rebellion, regardless of what happens to me."

"Yeah?" Melody asked. "So what's in it?"

Jessa pressed her lips together and said nothing.

"Really? _Really?_ You _don't know?_ " Melody's voice was starting to climb; Hal reached over long enough to give her a warning shove. She made a rude gesture at him, but quieted, never taking her eyes off of Calrissian. "What in the seven kriffing hells are you risking your life for, then?"

"Because it doesn't matter what's in it! That message has coded information from the Emperor's most private databases. No matter what it is, it's something he doesn't want anyone else to know about. That makes it invaluable." Calrissian looked from one face to the next as if trying to impress the importance of her words with sheer force of will. "The person who sent me the message isn't a Rebel agent, but she's scared. Everyone on Imperial Center is scared. There are rumors about what the Emperor really is, and if you're heard talking about them, you and your entire family disappear."

"What the Emperor really is?" Ben echoed - and _that_ , at least, made his presence thrum with sudden fear.

Hal cut him off. He felt ill. "Whatever rumors you've heard," he said to Calrissian, "the truth's worse. Trust me."

"Then you should understand why this is so important," Calrissian said. "We must get to a hangar bay and escape."

"Not without Han we aren't." He could feel Melody glaring at him, but this wasn't negotiable and they both knew it. "And not without Ben's cousin, either. We all get off this boat or no one does."

Calrissian just folded her arms and looked disgruntled. "We barely escaped from the detention block. How exactly are we going to rescue two other people?"

"We could ask him to rig up another catastrophe for us," Melody suggested, jabbing a finger in Ben's general direction. He was hastily shedding the rest of his stormtrooper armor as if it was burning him, but he stopped long enough to shake his head at her. She shrugged, unrepentant. "Just thought I'd ask, kid."

Once they got out of this - _if_ they got out of this - Hal was going to have to find out exactly what it was Ben had done to rattle an entire Star Destroyer so badly. Now clearly wasn't the time, however. "We could do what we did on Nar Shaddaa?" he offered.

Melody's eyebrows shot up to somewhere around her hairline. "Pretty sure that was a one-time thing, Hal. I don't care what that Hutt said, you don't look _that_ good in - "

"No, not - " Hal offered a prayer for patience to whichever deity happened to be listening. "Not _that_. The thing with the hovercar."

"The what with what?" Calrissian asked, even as Melody started to get a contemplative look on her face that was frankly alarming.

"Punching holes in things with a ship. It worked great with that tent on Nar Shaddaa."

"Sure!" Melody added. "Hovercar, Imp shuttle, tent, hull, same difference."

Calrissian's expression was slowly collapsing into an expression of mounting horror. "You're half-witted _nerfherders_. I should have stayed in my cell." She put her head in her hands and gave a short, strangled scream of frustration.

Hal was about to suggest she could waltz right back to the detention block if she wasn't going to offer any better ideas, but before he could do more than open his mouth, an alarm started blaring at near-deafening volume.

Everyone, even Calrissian, turned and looked at Ben, who had sidled away from them at some point. He was standing by the door, up to his elbows in its emergency access panel.

"I switched on the fire alarm," he said, expression waffling between sheepish and defiant. "At least it's better than your shuttle-stealing idea."

Melody clapped Hal on the shoulder and leaned in close to his ear as she pulled herself up. "I'm gonna murder both of them, I fragging swear."

Just this once, Hal was inclined to agree with her.

\--

Sasha was almost starting to wish Rage would come back. At least with him she knew what she was dealing with.

But no. Despite the fact that _sirens_ were going off, Imps kept coming in to talk to her. Some of them were friendly in a saccharine treacly way that made her want to snap that she was thirteen, not two, and treating her like a toddler wasn't going to make her answer any questions. Some were much angrier, and one had even hit her across the jaw hard enough to make tears spring to her eyes and the metallic tang of blood well up in her mouth.

" _Ow_ ," she snarled, and then wished she hadn't, because speaking made her face hurt.

The Imp regarded her impassively and then left the room.

Probably to get an interrogation droid, Sasha realized. She refused to blink until the Imp was gone and she was alone again. When she did, hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

She wanted her mom and dad. She wanted Ben back. She wanted to pick fights with Brin Farstrider and watch stupid holodramas and cuss at broken vaporators. She wanted to go _home_.

The sirens got louder. Sasha took a deep shuddering breath. _Shut up_ , she scolded herself. _Shut up and pull it together, you stupid crybaby_.

Ben was somewhere on this ship - he _had_ to be - and she had been looking out for him ever since she was old enough to understand what being called a space bastard meant. Her family was stronger than the whole Empire.

It was time she acted like it.

She looked around the room. It clearly wasn't designed to hold prisoners, which suggested just how little the Imps thought of her resourcefulness. Clearly Rage had forgotten something about living on Tatooine, or maybe he had just never had to scrape out a living in the settlements on the very edge of the Dune Sea.

Growing up in Draco's Well meant learning to find a use for _anything_.

There was a picture hanging on one of the walls - a real old-fashioned picture, not a holoprojection. Sasha pushed her chair over to it, suddenly very grateful that her hands had been cuffed in front of her, and scrambled up to get a better look at it. It was some kind of night view of a big sprawling city, probably Imperial Center. More importantly, it was fastened to the wall with a hook. It took a bit of muscle and a lot of swearing, but she was able to wrench it free. The frame was solid and hard enough to leave a sizable dent in someone's skull if she hit hard enough. 

From there, she pushed the chair over to the door and climbed onto it, picture held at ready.

She had nervously hummed her way through seven and a half rounds of the _Thunder TIEs_ theme song when the door finally slid open again. She swung the picture down hard and -

"Ow! What the hell, kid?"

Oh, no. She dropped the picture and covered her face with her hands, trying to peek through her fingers. "Oh frag, oh frag, Captain Solo I am _so sorry_ \- "

The slightly concussed hero of the Rebellion rubbed his head and scowled at her, but all he said was "Let's get out of here."

She didn't have to be told twice. Captain Solo uncuffed her and led her into a nondescript corridor. There was a guard sprawled in front of the door to her makeshift prison, a smoking hole in their chest armor. Sasha stumbled over nothing and gulped down a wave of nausea that surprised her, somehow. She saw dead bodies all the time on _Captain Fantastik_. So what if they weren't real? She had seen Brin Farstrider's uncle laid out before his funeral, hadn't she? She had helped butcher a womprat that one time, right?

She could do this. She _could_.

Captain Solo scooped up the Imp's discarded blaster and handed it to her. It sat lighter and more compact in her hands than her family's old carbine. "How good are you at shooting?" he asked.

"Better than my cousin."

He gave her a look. "And how good's your cousin?"

"Awful," Sasha admitted.

That got a noncommittal _hmph_ in response before he set off down the corridor. Sasha double-checked the blaster rifle's safety and hurried after him, trying to keep close to the bulkheads like he did. Everything was empty and quiet except for the sirens. She didn't understand why.

"Where are we going?" she asked instead of voicing her concerns.

"Shuttle bay. With any luck that's where Hal will try to meet up with us."

"Hal escaped?"

In answer, Captain Solo pointed at a flashing alarm just down the corridor. "That wasn't me, kid."

Maybe it was Ben, Sasha thought. She tried not to grin to herself. Captain Solo could think whatever he wanted, but she would have bet every credit on Tatooine that this mayhem was somehow her cousin's doing. Deep down, he was just as much of a stubborn Darklighter as she was.

The thought made her heart feel lighter.

When they finally did stumble across Imps some time later, it was by complete accident. They rounded a corner and there was a squad. Sasha froze - but to be fair, so did they.

Captain Solo didn't. He grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her back around the corner, firing all the while. A moment later a hail of blaster bolts answered them. Sasha clutched her blaster rifle in shaking hands and squeezed her eyes shut, because _this_ \- the screaming and the mayhem, the acrid smell of burnt ozone - was nothing at all like _Thunder TIEs_.

She wanted to go home.

_Not without Ben._ It was like a mantra. _Not without Ben._

And under that, darker and stronger: _Don't you let them kill him too._

She opened her eyes and leaned around the corner once, twice, again - each time squeezing off a shot. On her fourth try, she found her mark. A stormtrooper dropped dead, chest smoking, just like the Imp she had seen when Captain Solo had rescued her.

_Don't you let them kill him too._

She ducked around the corner again, firing with more surety this time. She didn't feel ill anymore.

It was almost easy to kill, knowing that she had someone to protect.


End file.
